Resource information
Facilitating trade flows between
countries belonging to the same sub-region does not only
require adequate transport infrastructure, or the
availability of competitive and reliable transport services.
Both will be used effectively only to the extent allowed by
the legal framework governing their operations. Similarly,
better regional economic integration will be served not only
through harmonization of national development policies, but
also, and perhaps to a greater extent, through the
preparation, ratification and implementation of
supranational legal instruments, going from the subregion to
the continent and to the level of international conventions.
Those instruments provide the necessary framework
underpinning the sustainable development of trade flows,
themselves harbingers of economic growth and employment
generation. Sub-Saharan Africa clearly illustrates this
situation, where several sub-regions are working hard
from East to West to establish institutional and economic
ties to help stimulate the joint progress of forty-eight
countries. Actually, as a result of both whimsical politics
and geography, the existence in Africa of fifteen landlocked
countries has only strengthened the need to codify the rules
governing the exchanges between coastal states and
landlocked ones, so that the latter can benefit from a
facilitated access to external markets. So, while numerous
efforts are at play to push ahead with the regional
integration of the continent, it appeared timely to draw an
inventory of the legal instruments in force in sub-Saharan
Africa, aiming at facilitating transport and trade
flows between countries of the region. This document
presents this inventory, together with an analysis of the
main components and characteristics of all listed instruments.
