Resource information
Integration in the East African
Community offers significant opportunities not only to
expand trade among member states, but more importantly to
scale up regional production to take advantage of much
larger global market opportunities. Special economic zones
are a potentially valuable instrument to facilitate the
integration of regional value chains in support of this
scaling up. They also have the potential to deliver powerful
demonstration effects on the benefits of integration and to
help entrench the integration process. This paper discusses
the proposal for developing an "economic integration
zone" in the East African Community. The benefits of
such a zone could be substantial, as would be the practical
challenges to implementation -- in particular the political
economy challenges. However, a number of institutional and
commercial solutions exist to address these challenges.
