African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regional trade: Challenges and prospects

Abstract

The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) is a US trade act that has significantly enhanced US trade with
about 39 Sub-Saharan (SSA) countries. However, despite the opportunities in the trade program ECOWAS
countries have not benefitted much from the available opportunities in the program. The mission of this paper is
to look at why ECOWAS countries have not been able to capture the opportunities of AGOA significantly, from
the perspective of process product methods (PPM) standards and what need to be done by ECOWAS to take
advantage of the opportunities presented by the program. Therefore, this paper advocated some
recommendations to ECOWAS leaders and other policy makers ECOWAS countries should strengthen their
current position on trade and investments by expanding the list of their products on AGOA to include some more
processed agricultural products that are deemed import-sensitive. Similarly the pre-conditions for eligibility into
AGOA should be relaxed; especially protection of workers’ rights, intellectual property rights etc, due to the low
level of trade from the region as most firms in the region are at infant stage and may be costly for them to carry
out reforms in their operation areas, as they need time to do this. Furthermore, the use of trade preferences as a
tool to promote foreign policy objective by USA will not produce significant benefits in terms of enhancing the
regions trade and overall economic performance, the exclusion of Cote d’Ivoire is a reference point. Further
studies can be carried out especially on the need for trade expansion among countries in the region and on
knowledge management in ECOWAS states.