Bibliographie sélective OHADA

This article engages with the recently adopted agreement for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in the area of services. While services trade had heretofore stood at the queue of African trade pacts, the AfCFTA breaks new grounds by negotiating goods and services concurrently, signalling a paradigm shift and a commitment to a deeper integration of the continent. Upon Members’ implementation of the Protocol on Trade in Services, whose aim is to establish a single market in services, the region will be the largest economic integration agreement ever concluded since the birth of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This paper sets out to analyse the provisions of the Protocol and how they contribute to achieving the objective of attaining a single market where services (alongside goods, people and capital) move unrestricted.

Until recently, doing business in developing countries, and in Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, was associated with high risk. Although each investment decision is associated with some risk, there are always obligations incumbent on host States in that regard. However, when domestic law is too obsolete to match the requirements of an evolving investment and commercial environment which it is supposed to regulate, and when its effects are unpredictable, one of the fundamental conditions for attracting investment goes missing. This eventually underscores the need for a legal reform. The phenomenon of 'globalisation' on the one hand, and the need for (developing) countries to integrate their economies into the global market, on the other hand, considerably accentuated the postulate of development through law.Against this background, some African countries, at the dawn of the 1990s, felt a need to 'modernise' their legal systems for the major part inherited from colonialism. In this vein, they entrusted a supranational organ, the OHADA, to perform that legal reform. This paper is an attempt to test the OHADA against the discourse of law as a development engine. Furthermore, this is an assessment of the extent to which OHADA, as a legal tool, could be useful in serving the purpose of regional integration and economic growth in Africa.