IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aza/jpss00/y2016v10i2p205-214.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Lowering the cost of doing business in Africa: Leveraging the COMESA Regional Payments and Settlement System (REPSS)

Author

Listed:
  • Ssonko, George Wilson

Abstract

Africa contributes only a meagre proportion of global trade. Intra-regional trade among nations on the continent of Africa remains below that of other regions such as Asia, Europe, North America and so on. As part of the continent’s strategy to alleviate this shortcoming, efforts to promote trade have taken centre stage, with the creation of Regional Economic Communities (RECs). The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) is one of these RECs, and comprises 21 countries. In order to consolidate regional trade among these countries, COMESA put in place a secure, reliable and efficient payment system called the Regional Payment and Settlement System (REPSS). The REPSS denominates its transactions in US dollars and euros. Despite the many benefits attributable to the REPSS, uptake remains low because of technological glitches, stagnation of economic growth and structural transformation, as well as technological appropriation that has facilitated the proliferation of ‘illegal’ cross-border retail payment systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Ssonko, George Wilson, 2016. "Lowering the cost of doing business in Africa: Leveraging the COMESA Regional Payments and Settlement System (REPSS)," Journal of Payments Strategy & Systems, Henry Stewart Publications, vol. 10(2), pages 205-214, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:aza:jpss00:y:2016:v:10:i:2:p:205-214
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hstalks.com/article/738/download/
    Download Restriction: Requires a paid subscription for full access.
    File URL: https://hstalks.com/article/738/
    Download Restriction: Requires a paid subscription for full access.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    COMESA; REPSS; intraregional trade; Regional Economic Communities; payment systems; technological appropriation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G2 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services
    • E5 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aza:jpss00:y:2016:v:10:i:2:p:205-214. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Henry Stewart Talks (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.