Author : Jana Riedel
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (13 download)
Book Synopsis New Panel Data Evidence on Sub-Saharan Trade Integration by : Jana Riedel
Download or read book New Panel Data Evidence on Sub-Saharan Trade Integration written by Jana Riedel and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite FTA, formed in 2011, is supposed to be a milestone towards Africa's continental trade integration. This study analyzes the impact of regional integration among the Tripartite countries on their bilateral imports before that date to evaluate the latest integration efforts. We estimate an extended gravity model on a large panel of 51 African countries using yearly observations from 1995 to 2010. We proxy existing formal trade barriers by sample average data of tariffs on imports from the world as well as indicator variables for the membership in regional FTAs. We control for various other potential determinants of trade and discuss different sets of effects. We emphasize that modeling importer- and exporter-year effects matters for the results of our coefficients of interest. The estimates are not robust with regard to the estimation technique. We detect a direct positive impact on imports when joining one of the three FTAs in each of the loglinear specifications. However, an FTA status does not show a clear-cut import enhancing effect in the Poisson regressions. Whereas tariffs are not significantly correlated with imports in the loglinear framework, they show a strong negative correlation throughout the multiplicative models including several robustness checks.