Abstract

The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) is a US trade act that has significantly enhances US trade with about 39 Sub-Saharan (SSA) countries. However, despite the opportunities in the trade program ECOWAS countries have not benefitted much from the available opportunities in the program. The mission of this paper is to look at why ECOWAS countries have not been able to capture the opportunities of AGOA significantly, from the perspective of process product methods (PPM) standards and what need to be done by ECOWAS to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the program. Therefore, this paper advocated some recommendations to ECOWAS leaders and other policy makers ECOWAS countries should strengthen their current position on trade and investments by expanding the list of their products on AGOA to include some more processed agricultural products that are deemed import-sensitive. Similarly the pre-conditions for eligibility into AGOA should be relaxed; especially protection of workers’ rights, intellectual property rights etc, due to the low level of trade from the region as most firms in the region are at infant stage and may be costly for them to carry out reforms in their operation areas, as they need time to do this. Furthermore, the use of trade preferences as a tool to promote foreign policy objective by USA will not produce significant benefits in terms of enhancing the regions trade and overall economic performance, the exclusion of Cote d’Ivoire is a reference point. Further studies can be carried out especially on the need for trade expansion among countries in the region and on knowledge management in ECOWAS states.

Key words: African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), trade, exports.