The present paper takes a closer look at regional integration in the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS). With the aim to inform the ongoing discussion on further integration potential, insights from comprehensive surveys on exporters’ and importers’ perspectives on nontariff measures (NTMs), carried out in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali and Senegal under the International Trade Centre’s (ITC) NTM programme, are used to highlight remaining trade obstacles in the region and possibilities to overcome these.

Regional integration of African economies has been a long-lasting goal in the agenda of their leaders since it has been considered to offer a fairer distribution of the benefits of trade liberalization and therefore to ensure a more equilibrated economic development between countries. In the search for higher prosperity, African countries undertook several initiatives, which overlap each other in some cases to create an enabling environment for their own development. However, regional integration is not a straightforward process. It demands sustained willingness for cooperation and action within groupings in order to overcome “de jure” regional integration. Indeed, only a few initiatives have been able to show a measurable impact on trade relationships between its member countries.

Among initiatives, whose implementation became effective, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is a prominent example of continuous and sustained efforts towards regional integration in the African continent. This regional economic community (REC) was established more than four decades ago. It has also given birth to a number of affiliated institutions and agencies that not only promote economic integration but enlarge the scope of cooperation to other areas such as justice and security. The ECOWAS consists of 15 member countries, it represents more than 30 percent of the African population and one quarter of the African production is originated in the region.

Similarly to the several rounds of multilateral negotiations, regional agreements have mainly focused on tariff reductions and have contributed to a large improvement of market access conditions over time. However, it is now of common wisdom that market access is not only related to tariff levels, that trading operations undergo a number of procedures and that traded goods need to comply with rules issued by several jurisdictions. Procedures and rules applied to and related to trade are known as non-tariff measures (NTMs). The majority of these measures are implemented for legitimate reasons, e.g. ensuring sanitary conditions and health safety, protecting the environment and preventing custom tax evasion. Still, they are perceived as the largest challenges for regional integration, given the nature of their implementation. This perception has led to recent surge of interest on NTMs. Conversely to tariff levels, the implementation of NTMs is a less “smooth” process and usually several agencies or institutions are involved in each of these measures. These entwined actions for a single export operation might be a source of complexity and could eventually thwart the efforts for regional integration.

In order to avoid intrinsic complexity of NTMs that prevents the realization of benefits negotiated in regional and internationals arenas, the International Trade Centre (ITC) has developed a Programme to enhance the transparency on NTMs. ITC’s Programme on NTMs seeks to effectively contribute in this sense through the collection of official NTM data, by providing businesses the opportunity to share their NTM-related experiences, and by a continuous monitoring of NTMs and awareness-raising. Business surveys on NTMs are one of the pillars for the NTM programme. These surveys highlight the considerable scope for reducing trade cost caused by NTMs and allow identifying ways to address the trade obstacles these measures imply without harming legitimate objectives they may serve. As such, they enable the creation of a better and more trade-friendly environment and actively contribute to the trade integration of countries into the world economy.

To date, the ITC surveys have documented and share with decision-makers the experiences of over 22,500 exporters and importers, which are representative for traders in 63 countries, capturing obstacles to trade with 185 destination countries.

As of mid-2016, six out of the 15 countries in the ECOWAS region have benefited from a national and independent business survey on NTMs. Given the feedback received in each survey and the coverage achieved in the region, it has become clear that there is a need to assess regional integration within ECOWAS. The objective of this analysis is to raise awareness on the business perspectives and experiences on NTM-related issues in order to provide a snapshot of bottlenecks that might hinder trade integration. This analysis is meant to bring informative insights in order to contribute to deeper integration within ECOWAS and, at the same time, enable the implementation of relevant trade facilitation policies in the region.

The remainder of the paper consists of four main sections. The first section presents an overview of ECOWAS by revisiting its inception as well as its trade performance over last four decades. The second section details the methodology used by ITC business surveys on NTMs and discusses general findings of the surveys in ECOWAS by sector – agricultural and manufacturing – for intra-regional trade. In section 3, further evidence on burdensome measures enhances the understanding of difficulties faced by exporters in each sector-specific and cross-cutting obstacle to trade. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the findings of the study providing an overview of the key challenges of intra-regional trade.

This paper serves as background document for the high-level regional round table on NTMs, to be held in Abidjan on 14-15 June 2016. The paper was prepared in a collaboration between ITC and the African Development Bank (AfDB).