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Kenya urges regional bloc to harmonize taxes to spur trade

Xinhua, March 5, 2015 Adjust font size:

Kenya on Thursday called on the East Africa Community (EAC) governments to harmonize their taxes to ease regulatory barriers to spur regional trade.

Principal Secretary for Kenya's State Department of East African Affairs, John Konchellah, said Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs) have hampered trade, increased costs of doing business and stifled free movement of goods.

"The EAC is focused on eliminating barriers to trade, increasing free movement of persons, labor, goods and capital," Konchellah said.

He said the regional bloc has taken several measures including strengthening of national and regional committees as well as monitoring tools.

"The challenges that come with elimination of NTBs are in their mutative nature. They can be imposed and withdrawn at will," Konchellah said.

"Their (NTBs) imposition can attract retaliatory measures from affected partner states, which add costs and transit time for goods traded across boarders," the official said.

The EAC is targeting the creation of a political federation, and a borderless single state made up of the five countries, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania, exercising a single foreign policy.

To get the vision of a single state in motion, the Arusha-based EAC Secretariat has been working towards a foreign policy, a common defense policy, a customs union, which is currently in place and the Monetary Union, which aims at a single currency.

Efforts to create a single state in East Africa have been ongoing since 2004 when the leaders of the region met in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and agreed that its creation should be the ultimate goal of a process that started with the gradual opening of the borders to trade. Endi