About

Method

This is a public draft: it is published while the checking goes on, and every citation says how far it has got. 47 of 182 quotations have been matched against their documents by a reader or a supplied copy; 43 more were matched word for word by machine. A person still has to check them all.

Each policy area asks one question. Its blockers are documented constraints on cross-border trade or investment, typed as regulatory, physical, commercial, financial, institutional, information. Its ideas are the reforms, rules, agreements and projects that could relieve them, each with a status on four tracks. Stakeholders are the institutions the records name.

Three statements are always kept apart, because evidence for one is not evidence for the next:

• a constraint exists, which needs the operator's or regulator's own observations;
• a project or decision is expected to relieve it, which is attributed to whoever expects it;
• a specified amount of trade is held back and this remedy would release it, which stays unresolved until evidence connects the two.

Reach (sometimes called centrality) is counted from the records: how many cross-border connections and blockers an idea is linked to, and how many institutions in how many places it names. It measures what the records cover, not how important an idea is.

A missing document is not evidence that nothing happened. Every area and country page carries a coverage statement, and nothing is labelled dormant or stalled.

How to read a status

A status asserts only what its evidence establishes, and carries the date of the latest milestone it rests on. "Consulted · Aug 2025" means a consultation was verified in August 2025, not that one is open today.

Source markers show the passage. A filled dot means the wording was matched against the document by a reader or a supplied copy; a hollow dot means no one has checked it yet. A record is marked reviewed only after a person has read every quotation in it in the original.

Who is behind it

This is Laurence Wilse-Samson's project. It is independent: it is not produced by, or endorsed by, any government, regional body or institution named on it.

Built with AI tools

The site was built mostly with Claude, Anthropic's AI model, with help from Cursor and ChatGPT. Claude drafts the records, finds and extracts the passages, and writes most of the site's code. Cursor agents wrote some of the code from written briefs, and ChatGPT reviewed the design and visuals. Codex and GitHub Copilot review every change, and their findings are logged in the repository. Every statement on the site rests on a quoted or paraphrased source passage, not on a generated answer, and each citation says whether a person has checked it against the document yet.

Map and regional groupings

Country outlines: Natural Earth 1:50m Admin 0 - Countries, v5.1.1 (naturalearth.s3.amazonaws.com/50m_cultural/ne_50m_admin_0_countries.zip). Public domain. Natural Earth places no restrictions on use: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/terms-of-use/ Regional groupings come from the country table of The African Economy's data layer.