Andreas Freytag
Email: Andreas.Freytag@uni-jena.de
Andreas Freytag is Professor of Economics at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and Honorary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch. He is also Director of Tutwa Europe member of the CESifo Research network, a Senior Research Fellow at ECIPE, Brussels, and a Senior Research Associate at SAIIA, Johannesburg; he is associated to the G8 Research Group at the University of Toronto. Freytag has obtained his diploma from the University of Kiel, his doctorate as well his Habilitation from the University of Cologne. Prior to his appointment in Jena, he worked at the Kiel Institute for World Economics, the University of Cologne, Cambridge University (as Visiting Scholar), and the Eesti Pank, Tallinn, Estonia. He has been consultant for the EU-Commission, the OECD, the IMF and various public and private clients. Freytag was a member of the executive board of the European Public Choice Society from 2006 to 2009 and SAIIA’s Bradlow Fellow 2008. He has published a number of books and articles in first-class peer-reviewed journals on economic policy, international trade policy, development economics and international policy coordination. He contributes to blogs and has a weekly column on wiwo-online, a German magazine.
Papers Published in World Economics:
Analysing Intra-African Trade
In March 2018, most African heads of state gathered in Kigali to sign the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), marking the culmination of intense negotiations. A number of central issues remain unresolved: it is an agreement with a substantial sensitive/exclusion list for tariffs on goods, with strict product-specific rules of origin and institutions for remedying trade that could be abused to protect domestic lobbies. The regulatory content of the AfCFTA could be described as ‘WTO-minus’, although it does bring non-members of the World Trade Organization into the fold. The level of ambition in the services negotiations seems to be low so it is likely that further liberalisation will be pursued over time, encompassing new areas such as e-commerce.
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Global Financial Crisis, Protectionism and Current Account Deficit
The recent financial and economic crisis, and the resurgence in the popularity of emerging markets has raised fears in these economies of a resumption in capital flight or a sudden stop of capital inflows. The latter, in particular, is intensively discussed in South Africa. We try to evaluate this danger by focusing on the sustainability of South Africa’s current account deficit during the recent past, and on longterm economic policy developments in the country. We argue that the macroeconomic as well as the relevant microeconomic policy variables do not suggest a sudden stop. However, to lower this risk further, the microeconomic environment has to be improved considerably in the future. This includes mainly reforms in the areas of infrastructure, competition and trade policy.
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