Assessment of the impact of the Economic Partnership Agreement between the ECOWAS countries and the European Union

The present study consists of eight sections. After the introduction, we present in the first section, the profile of the ACP-EU cooperation agreements from Lomé to Cotonou. We also show how a certain “grey areas” in the WTO rules on regional agreements can enable African countries to benefit more from the EPAs by taking advantage of greater flexibility. The next section presents some graphical data on Africa’s trade flows in general and on trade flows of ECOWAS in particular. The third section deals with the analytical framework in general equilibrium. It contains a presentation of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model used for assessing the impact of different partnership agreement options. In the fourth section, we focus on the characteristics of African economies, which are drawn from the GTAP database and which play a key role in the operative interactions in this kind of liberalization. The fifth section deals with the analytical framework in partial equilibrium which is complementary to the general-equilibrium modelling. The assessments of the economic impacts of the EPAs for Africa, using the general-equilibrium model, are analysed in the sixth section, while those particularly concerning the ECOWAS countries, using the partial-equilibrium framework, are presented in the penultimate section. Finally, the last section comprises concluding remarks.