Addis Ababa — The Commission on Capital Flows to Africa, an initiative sponsored by the United States Corporate Council on Africa and the Washington DC-based Institute for International Economics, has spent the last nine months developing "A Ten-Year Strategy For Increasing Capital Flows to Africa".
The Commission's report, released today, makes a wide-ranging series of recommendations for policy changes in the United States and other industrialized countries to promote increased capital flows to Africa, premised on steps by the African countries themselves to provide lasting improvements in their investment climate.
It suggests major changes in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), culminating in a free trade agreement between the United States and Africa, to attract investment to the continent. It proposes a ten-year moratorium on all U.S. taxes on repatriated earnings from new investments by U.S. companies in Africa. It outlines major changes in the programmes of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to galvanize additional private investment there. Other recommendations relate to official development assistance, export credit financing and debt relief.
The Commission is composed of twenty-eight members including US private sector leaders, former senior US government officials, and other experts from the United States, Europe, Japan and Africa itself. The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Executive Secretary, K.Y. Amoako, serves as a member of the Commission.
