我是马蓉爸爸微博:2012年02月12日 note

voa

The World Bank says regional trade barriers 区域贸易壁垒are blocking African countries from billions of dollars in potential earnings.

It says it’s easier for those countries to trade with other parts of the world than with each other. The World Bank has released a new report – called De-Fragmenting 整合 Africa: Deepening Regional Integration一体化.

“All the Africa market is split into many individual country markets so many of those countries are small.

And bringing those markets together would bring a lot of opportunities for people to trade across borders, but (also) to exploit the benefits of a much larger market.

And the book is about barriers that ordinary traders face every day in trying to get across borders that are fragmenting 分割，碎片those markets

he says there are great opportunities for opening new markets

For example, in agricultural products, Africa has enormous potential to produce and sell more agricultural products.

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But barriers to trade are limiting that potential

There’s also potential in manufactures .

As Africa grows and middle classes emerge中产阶级出现, there are plenty of opportunities for manufactures to be produced locally.

But again, they’re not emerging yet.

And there are also plenty of opportunities for trade in services for people, for professionals – doctors, teachers – to be able to sell their services across borders,

Africa’s traditional markets of Western Europe and the United States have been “stagnant” due to the global recession.

There are new markets and they’re very close

And it seems obvious that Africa should be exploiting its own markets as they grow,

but often it’s much harder for Africans to trade with each other than it is for them to trade the rest of the world 

The World Bank official says trade barriers in Africa often occur right at the border.

There are a lot of agreements on regional trade in Africa on paper 

And the real challenge is implementation. 

implementation [,implimen'tei??n] 详细?
n. [计] 实现；履行；安装启用

So what we find at the borders is a real lack of implementation of these agreements.

In part, that reflects反映 issues of governance.

So if you go to the border of the DRC with Rwanda, you find there are 70 agencies at the border,

each trying to get some money of traders as they cross the border and, even worse, harassing骚扰 them in some cases.

sexual harassment..

Now, there should only be four agencies at the border

Trade barriers can affect consumers, as well

For example, the South African supermarket chain, Shoprite, spends $20,000 a week on permits just to sell products in Zambia alone

If a firm has to spend a lot of resources on paper works, on getting the necessary permits and licenses,

if their trucks spend a long  time waiting at the border because the processing of these documents takes such a long time

then that’s passed on to the consumer in terms of high prices