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GTAP Resources: Resource Display

GTAP Resource #3888

"The Growth and Food Security Implications of the EU-ECOWAS FTA Scenarios"
by Fofana, Ismael and Fatou Cisse


Abstract
The market access offer made by ECOWAS region to the European Union (EU) is revealed in terms of levels and pace of liberalization. Early studies on the issue focused on the economic performances and fiscal consequences and failed to highlight the social implications. Our study assesses the impact of the EU-ECOWAS FTA scenarios on merchandises with a focus on agricultural growth and food security.

The study uses a multi-country Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model calibrated to fifteen social accounting matrices (SAMs). The original features of the SAMs are maintained to avoid the loss of precious information through a harmonization process and a CGE model is developed for each of the fifteen West African States. A second peculiarity of the study is the use of fifteen poverty modules within the multi-country CGE model. The modules which provide economic information on several thousands of real households derived from representative surveys of populations helped in assessing the impact on poverty and food security. The third peculiarity of the study is the simulation of realistic scenarios of market access offers by ECOWAS to the EU.

The results indicate that beyond a threshold of 65%, the liberalization of merchandise imports from the EU put a risk of decelerating the economic growth in the region. The liberalization of products in group C, which mainly include agriculture and food products, could lead to increased poverty when the liberalization hits 70% of imports. This increase in poverty is very significant when the pace of liberalization is more sustained.

The study shows that the agricultural sector, in its current state, is particularly vulnerable to the simulated market access scenarios. Agricultural growth is severely reduced and food insecurity increases compared to the reference scenario (absence of FTA). The success of a FTA between EU and ECOWAS relies on the performance of the agricultural sector. The impact of the market access sc...


Resource Details (Export Citation) GTAP Keywords
Category: 2012 Conference Paper
Status: Published
By/In: Presented at the 15th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, Geneva, Switzerland; CRES Working Paper (forthcoming french version)
Date: 2012
Version:
Created: Fofana, I. (4/30/2012)
Updated: Fofana, I. (4/30/2012)
Visits: 2,067
No keywords have been specified.


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