Current Trends in the Economic Development of the Participating in the Tripartite Free Trade Area Regional Economic Communities

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, the East African Community and the Southern Africa Development Community are three of the eight regional economic communities that are recognized by the African Union as building blocks of the African Economic Community. The three RECs recently concluded the negotiations to establish the Tripartite free trade area on a tariff-free, quota-free, exemption-free basis by simply combining their existing free trade areas. The multiplicity of trading arrangements in southern and eastern Africa, ranging from bilateral agreements between individual countries to free trade areas and customs unions, poses a huge implementation challenge to the deepening and development of the process of economic integration thus the creation of the Tripartite free trade area can be regarded as a step in the right direction. The paper aims at presenting the economic properties of the economies in the three RECs participating in the negotiations on the Tripartite FTA with a special focus on the analysis on intracommunity trade as an indicator for the current state-of-art and the perspective of the integration process in the three RECs. It presents the aims, principles and main challenges of the Tripartite FTA negotiations. Then it examines thoroughly the three participating RECs in terms of the economic properties of their member states and the trends in their international trade. Some conclusions are drawn on the integration potential of the participating RECs as well as on the possibilities presented by the creation of the Tripartite FTA. Keywords. Tripartite FTA, COMESA-EAC-SADC, Regional economic integration, African economy. JEL. F15, F55, N77.