Peter Draper
Email: peter.draper@adelaide.edu.au
Peter Draper is Executive Director of the Institute for International Trade in the Faculty of the Professions, University of Adelaide, Australia. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Chamber of Commerce’s Research Foundation; non-resident senior fellow of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy; and Associated Researcher at the German Development Institute (DIE). He is also a Director of Tutwa Consulting Group. He is a recipient of an honorary Doctorate degree from the Friederich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. For ten years he was, respectively, member, chair, vice chair, and co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Global Trade and FDI system. Previously, he worked in South Africa’s national Department of Trade and Industry in bilateral economic relations (East Asia and Mercosur), and as head of the economic analysis and research unit in the dti’s International Trade and Economic Development Division. Prior to that he was an academic teaching economic history and political economy, and headed the Department of Economics and Economic History at the then University of Durban-Westville (now University of KwaZulu-Natal).
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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