The project's main objective is to study the macroeconomic and trade impact on different economic sectors in Brazil, Argentina and other emerging countries (India, Russia, and South Africa) arising from the creation of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the context of a post-COVID reality.
 

This empirical study provides an impact assessment of Oman’s free trade agreements (FTAs) on the productivity and exporting capability of its local manufacturing firms. It underlines the significance of FTAs in the development of the country’s industrial sector and the extent to which trade flows and spillover mechanisms impact the performance of local firms. It critically evaluates the five FTAs that Oman has concluded with major trading partners to determine the extent to which the country has benefitted from these agreements.

This study establishes the hazard rate of exports from Kenya and identifies factors that explain the duration of exports using a discrete-time random effects logit regression model. A difference-in-differences estimator is used to assess the effects of AGOA. Export data between Kenya and 176 partners over 21 years (1995–2016) is used. We find that first-year survival rate is 39%. The median duration of Kenya’s exports is 1 year. AGOA enhances export survival, especially for apparels. COMESA also increases export survival but EAC has a dampening effect, even in SSA region.

Globalisation has become an unavoidable incidence with almost every country involved in some new form of economic integration arrangement. In Africa, the largest trade agreement, the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) was recently signed in order to boost intra-trade and to increase not only economic welfare, but also living standards. However, when such trade arrangements occur, some economic sectors are likely to gain while others shrink due to changes in trade dynamics. The effects are structural changes within the economy of the respective countries.

Namibia is an open economy where international trade accounts for a greater proportion of gross domestic product (GDP). Openness of the Namibian economy for the period 2010 to 2018 has been on average 111% of GDP. The high level of openness of the economy raised an important question on the relationship between export and economic growth in Namibia. Previous studies investigated the linear relationship between these two variables. The investigation was also done at an aggregate level.

A great deal of information is available on international trade flows and potential markets. Yet many exporters do not know how to identify, with adequate precision, those markets that hold the greatest potential. Even if they have access to relevant information, the sheer volume of information often makes the analytical process complex, time-consuming and costly. An additional challenge is that many exporters lack an appropriate decision-making methodology, which would enable them to adopt a systematic approach to choosing foreign markets.

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.

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