The Tripartite Sectoral Committee of Ministers announced that the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) covering three Regional Economic Communities – the East African Community (EAC), the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) will be launched in mid-December at the Tripartite Summit of Heads of State and Government in Cairo, Egypt. Talks on the project among the 26 countries ranging from Egypt to South Africa were launched in 2008 and endorsed in 2011. The TFTA will have a combined population of 625 million people, and an aggregate GDP of US$1 trillion covering 58 percent of the continent’s economic activity. The immediate objective is to reduce the thickness of borders across the continent so as to raise inter-regional trade across the continent, now standing at just 12 percent to total trade. An action plan released by the African Union says that the TFTA would be followed by a continental customs union forming in 2019. According to the WTO, in 2010, the 58 African countries were involved in 55 Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) of which 43 were South-South PTAs. PTAs (RECs or Regional Economic Communities is the usual acronym used when discussing regional integration in Africa) are good politics. Broad evidence suggests that economics and politics are complements rather than substitutes (as argued by defenders of multilateralism): RTAs reduce the probability of war through two channels: by increasing the opportunity cost of war; and by reducing information asymmetries as partners know each other better. But to survive, PTAs must extend beyond unfilled good intentions and have a sufficiently sound economic basis, the focus of this note. So far success on the economic front has been modest, not least because of the great diversity in memberships across PTAs. Members include resource-rich and resource-poor, coastal and landlocked (15 landlocked countries in Africa), large and small, artificial borders, and many ethnic groups and languages. Figure 1 shows that the EAC is the REC with the smallest disparities in per capita exports of rent-generating natural resources. It also happens to be the REC—along with UEMOA—where integration has been ‘deep’, a five-member customs union operational since 2009. The gLAWcal Team LIBEAC project 5 December 2014 (Source: International Trade Centre)