The modern economy is becoming increasingly intangible, but tax systems are still built to see what is tangible. A factory announces its presence through machines, workers, inventories and trucks. The service economy leaves a different footprint: a laptop, a digital payment, a remote contract, a transaction that crosses borders without moving a single good. The value is there, but the taxpayer may be harder to find. As developing economies become more service-driven, the challenge is no longer simply to tax economic activity, but to make it visible to the tax systems designed to capture it. Read on Eurasia Review.

Africa does not always integrate by signing treaties. Increasingly, countries are using softer instruments to turn political commitment into practical cooperation. Regional integration is traditionally associated with treaties, protocols and binding obligations. But across Africa, ministerial declarations, MoUs and other forms of soft law are increasingly being used to create a common direction without requiring countries to harmonise their laws, move at the same speed or establish new supranational institutions. The Horn of Africa Initiative offers a revealing example. In September, the Ministers of Trade of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, and Somalia adopted a Joint Ministerial Declaration establishing a Regional Trade Facilitation Committee and creating a framework for coordinating regional priorities, implementation and financing. And the approach is not unique to the Horn. Similar instruments are being used in other African regions and geographical contexts to move cooperation forward where binding legal integration may not yet be feasible or hard to implement. The real significance, however, lies in what happens after the signature. Soft law can bridge political commitment and practical cooperation, allowing countries to integrate through action before integration is consolidated in law, but only if commitments translate into coordinated action, clear responsibilities, resources and tangible results. This is precisely the direction the Horn of Africa Initiative countries are seeking to pursue: integration not by waiting for institutional convergence, but by building practical interdependence through coordinated projects. This article on Modern Diplomacy mirrors the central proposition of the paper Rethinking Africa’s Integration: African integration is advancing less through uniformity and more through countries learning to work together around concrete interests, projects and shared priorities. Africa's experience demonstates that integration not always begins with a treaty. It may begin when countries coagulate their interests around common goals, transforming such interests into a force capable of collective action.