Evaluation of Non-Tariff Measures for African agricultural exports to the EU in a CGE framework

This paper evaluates the role of Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs) on agri-food trade between the EU and Africa. Given that the effects of NTMs cannot be generalised across products and regions the analysis considers several agricultural and horticultural products exported from Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Morocco, Uganda and South Africa. In these five countries 95 exporters were interviewed to obtain first hand information on five types of obstacle to exports: taxes and subsidies, customs and procedures, standards and regulations, specific limitations, and distribution chain and infrastructure. Indices corresponding to these five items were built and were integrated into an econometric analysis based on the approach presented by Fugazza (2008) to obtain estimates of the NTM effects on bilateral trade between the EU and the African countries. The values obtained from the econometric analysis were transformed into ad valorem tariffs equivalents (AVEs), and introduced into a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to study the effects of their presence and removal. The simulation results indicate the potential outcome of removing selected obstacles. From the econometric results, findings point to an overall positive effect resulting from standards and regulations, as well as from improvements in transportation, packaging, handling and preserving of African agricultural products. These findings provide empirical evidence on the effects of NTMs on African exports of agricultural products to the EU. They also support previous theoretical studies in which significant impacts are expected when standards and improvements are introduced into the agri-food export chain (Beghin, 2001).