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This paper examines the history of regional integration in Africa, what has motivated it, the different initiatives that African governments have pursued, the nature of the integration process, and the current challenges. Regional integration is seen as a rational response to the difficulties faced by a continent with many small national markets and landlocked countries. As a result, African governments have concluded a very large number of regional integration arrangements, several of which have significant membership overlap. While characterized by ambitious targets, they have a dismally poor implementation record. Part of the problem may lie in the paradigm of linear market integration, marked by stepwise integration of goods, labour and capital markets, and eventually monetary and fiscal integration. This tends to focus on border measures such as the import tariff. However, supply-side constraints may be more important. A deeper integration agenda that includes services, investment, competition policy and other behind-the-border issues can address the national-level supply-side constraints far more effectively than an agenda which focuses almost exclusively on border measures.

South Africa's new competition policy and law were drafted during the early years of South Africa's new democracy, a period characterized by important domestic policy and regulatory reform. These reforms were not only part of the comprehensive program for the country's economic, social, and political transformation, but also its integration into the global economy after decades of isolation under the apartheid regime. In the case of competition policy, however, concerns about specific development challenges entrenched by the previous era of political and economic control, had to be explicitly reflected in the new South Africa's law and policy. It was clear that a robust competition law would only be politically possible if the law specifically addressed public interest concerns. The core focus of economic efficiency had to be tempered by a strong emphasis on development. In the end, the new competition law, even with the broad sweep of its objectives, puts economic efficiency center-stage. Public interest objectives are articulated alongside the goal of economic efficiency. Only as the jurisprudence develops will the nature of the trade-offs within this nexus of objectives become clear. This paper reviews briefly the new 1998 Competition Act ("Competition Act" or "Act") and the institutions established to enforce the new law. The new Act marks a significant step in the development of effective market governance in South Africa. However, much remains to be done to develop capacity, in particular the institutional capacity for effectively enforcing competition law, and complementary regulatory frameworks that will support the broad competition policy objectives that reach beyond efficiency to encompass public interest objectives. And perhaps even more important, especially in light of recent investigations into alleged restrictive practices and cases that have been heard, there remains much to be done to change firm behaviour from mere maneuvering around competition law to effective compliance.

AbstractRegional industrial development has been the focus of a number of very specific policy initiatives in South African since the 1960s. Until the end of the 1980s these initiatives were driven by political imperative: to develop the homeland areas and to stem migration to South Africa's cities. They failed on both counts. In the early 1990s, industrial policy was markedly less focused on location. However more recently the Spatial Development Initiatives (SDI) and Industrial Development Zone (IDZ) programmes have both involved the identification of industrial locations and used incentives to encourage firms to locate in these areas. The SDI programme has specifically taken South African regional industrial policy into the southern African region with its cross‐border development corridors.The paper questions the underlying rationale for South Africa's regional industrial policy, and in particular the role of incentives in influencing firm‐level decisions, including their location decisions. The tentative conclusion is that there is no reason to suppose that the South African government could or can do better than the market in directing firm‐level location decisions, and that industrial policy incentives may be far less important to the firm than macroeconomic and market conditions. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Die acht Aufsätze beschäftigen sich mit mehreren Aspekten der außenwirtschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit zwischen der EU und den Staaten des südlichen Afrika. Dabei geht es um die Zukunft des Lome-Vertrages, Fragen des internationalen Welthandels sowie das Funktionieren der regionalen Handelskooperation im südlichen Afrika. (DÜI-Wgm)