By Marian Tupy | From Cato Institute

According to the South African newspaper Mail and Guardian, “African leaders on Wednesday signed a potentially historic, 26-nation free-trade pact to create a common market spanning half the continent, from Cairo to Cape Town. The deal on the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) is the culmination of five years of negotiations to set up a framework for preferential tariffs easing the movement of goods in an area that is home to 625-million people…. The deal will integrate three existing trade blocs – the East African Community, the Southern African Development Community and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) – whose countries have a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of more than $1-trillion.”

“Potentially historic” is the right term for what could be a greatly beneficial agreement. African parliaments will have two years to ratify the agreement – and that is the easy part. Proper implementation and enforcement will be much more difficult in countries with deeply underdeveloped institutions of rule of law and protection of private property. Still, the TFTA is a step in the right direction, for it signals an important ideological shift on the part of the African elite. Historically, African governments have been deeply skeptical of free trade and capitalism. Instead, they preferred protectionism and state-led development. To the extent that they were interested in trade, the African governments emphasized access to Western markets, while eschewing liberalization of their own. The consequences were catastrophic. As I wrote in a 2005 Cato paper,

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