One of the most compelling arguments for regional trade and integration in Africa is that the African market is the most fragmented in the world, with only 16% of trade being within the continent. Furthermore, with 14 regional economic communities (RECs), the scale of integrated trading compared to the magnitude of trade is cause for concern. Africa could soon witness an important milestone on its path towards increased regional trade and improved integration with the implementation of the Tripartite Free Trade Agreement (TFTA) involving 26 countries.

The paper employed the augmented gravity model to determine the trade creation and trade diversion effects of economic integration. Results indicate that the income importing country was significant at the 1% level, while the exporting one was weakly significant at the 10% level. Weighted distance was negative and significant at the 1% level. Of the country idiosyncratic factors, language was insignificant and shared border was significantly positive, while landlocked was significantly negative at 1%.

Although currently limited, services trade holds great potential for Bangladesh, as services already make a major contribution to GDP and employment. Services represent an important alternative (in the longer term) or complement (in the shorter term) to ready-made garments (RMGs), which have long dominated Bangladesh’s export mix. The country is poised to see declining RMG export revenues when the country graduates out of least developed country (LDC) status and loses its trade preferences in global markets.

This paper aims to investigate Thailand’s export potentials in the ASEAN+6 countries, due to a “full liberalization and accessibility scenario” within the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The methodology used is that of “filtering” statistical country data on macro-economic performance and imports following the Decision Support Model (DSM). The macro-economic data used are from the World Bank and the countries’ imports data are from the 2017 CEPII BACI data set. The export potentials thus identified are the base line in the further analysis.

A casual look at Europe’s and Africa’s experiences of integration suggests that they share certain similarities. They have also adopted a number of similar institutions and policy frameworks, and both regions have set for themselves the ambitious target of creating economic communities for their respective regions. They, however, have followed different historical trajectories of integration, which challenges the notion that the similarities in their adopted institutions of integration could be an attempt by the African Union (AU) to mimic the European Union (EU) integration experience.

This paper was presented jointly by Wilma Viviers and Leila Baghdadi.

This research project was begun on the initiative of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. 
 

The main purpose of this study is to study the impact of Regional Integration on the attractiveness of Foreign Direct Investment in Sub-Saharan African countries. This investigation was carried out using a panel data analysis, over a sample of 30 countries for a time-period of 23 years, from 1996 to 2018. To account for the modelling of dynamics and to establish the short-run and long-run relationships between Foreign Direct Investment, the Unrestricted Vector Autoregressive model was employed.

The “Chinafrica” relationship has recently been the focus of several international political discourses, whereby the motives behind recent breathtakingly fast upsurge of Chinese FDI in the African continent is being questioned. Hence, the purpose of this study is to analyse why China has been exponentially investing into Africa and it examines the determinants of Chinese FDI in Africa. The conceptual model is based upon the UNCTAD framework of FDI and the investigation is carried out using a balanced panel data from a sample of 25 African countries over the period 2005-2015.