Tariff Escalation and Import Bans in the Economic Partnership Agreement between the EU and West Africa

In the context of globalization, there are considerable potentials for developing countries to get integrated into the global market. To establish an enduring duty-free-quota-free trade area through the gradual removal of trade barriers, West African states and the EU have been negotiating the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA). The two partners of the agreement include the West Afri-can States, comprising those countries in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) plus Mauritania (16 states in total), of the one part, and the EU-28, of the other part. According to the ECOWAS agreement, the imports from outside of ECOWAS are subject to the Common External Tariff (CET) while the trade between members is duty-free. However, the EU-EPA agreement allows the West African Countries to access the EU market immediately while they are supposed to gradually liberalize 75 percent of tariff lines for the EU’s products in a 20-years transmission period. The dismantling process to liberalize import tariffs is designed in 5 product groups with different base duties identified as ECOWAS CET. One group known as sensitive products is excluded from liberalization. Thus, the final applied tariff rate depends on the ECOWAS CET as well as the dismantling process proposed by EPA. To achieve a certain objective, these two policy strategies should be in the same line. In this sense, an important implication is related to the tariffs of processed products and raw material along the value chain. Increasing applied tariff with the stage of processing is known as tariff escalation in the policy literature (Hwang et al. 2017).