Featuring a wealth of data-driven evaluations of trade negotiations and policy choices, How Africa Trades is an invaluable open access resource for making sense of the continent’s major trade challenges, including commodity dependence, competitiveness, and how African countries engage with often unconducive international trade rules that distort global markets.
In-depth analysis focuses on intra-African trade initiatives, including the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), trade between African countries and their major trading partners, and how the short-term shocks of Covid-19 restrictions brought about longer-term changes in informal and formal trade patterns, and sped-up shifts in digital trade.
David Luke is professor in practice and strategic director at the London School of Economics Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa, where he oversees the Africa Trade Programme. He is a former director of the African Trade Policy Centre at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), where he led the technical work on the protocols that make up the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement. His research interests include boosting intra-African trade; the AfCFTA initiative; Africa’s multilateral and bilateral trade relationships; and cross-cutting policy areas such as trade, industrialisation and structural transformation; trade, inclusion and gender; trade and public health; and trade and climate change.