This is a sample policy brief — replace with the full analysis.

The African Continental Free Trade Area is the most ambitious integration project on the continent, and its investment chapter is silent where it matters most: subsidy regulation. This brief maps where that silence sits, and why it has a cost.

The gap

Without a continental discipline on subsidies, member states compete for investment by giving away the very fiscal space that industrial policy requires. The agreement regulates what crosses borders; it says little about what governments may spend to shape what gets produced behind them.

Recommendation

A subsidy protocol negotiated now — before disputes harden positions — would cost less than the litigation that will otherwise define the next decade of continental trade law.