Unrestricted Market Access for Sub-Saharan Africa: How Much is it Worth and Who Pays?

By Elena Ianchovichina, Aaditya Mattoo, Marcelo Olarreaga. 2001

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The European Union (EU), Japan, and the United States (US) have recently announced initiatives to improve market access for the poorest countries. The authors assess the impact on Sub-Saharan Africa of these initiatives, and others that might be taken. They find that fully unrestricted access to all the Quad countries (Canada, The EU, Japan, and the US) would produce substantial gains for Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to a fourteen percent increase in non-oil exports ($ 2.5 billion), and boosting real incomes by about one percent ($ 1.8 billion). Most of these gains would come from preferential access to the highly protected Japanese, and European agricultural markets, especially the heavily protected Japanese market for meat, and certain cereal grains. The smallness of Sub-Saharan Africa's trade ensures that the costs of trade diversion for the Quad, other developing countries, and the world, would be on the whole, negligible. One concern, however, is that preferential access to protected markets might lead Sub-Saharan Africa to produce goods in which it does not have a global comparative advantage, and the future erosion of these preferences might lead to adjustment costs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7111c0daf1520c7f112c357239175f5c7182895

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Citations in the corpus

China–Africa Trade Relations: Insights from AERC Scoping Studies (2009, background): “This confirmed the result of the simulation of global liberalisation (post-duty-free access granted to SSA) by Ianchovichina et al (2002) 501r 2009 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes 0957-8811 European Journal of Development Research Vol. 21, 4, 485–505 which…”
Foreign direct investment in Africa: Performance, challenges, and responsibilities ☆ (2006, background): “Furthermore, there is evidence that the elimination of trade barriers and unfair subsidies on agricultural goods by the European Union, the United States, Japan, and Canada will increase Sub-Saharan Africa’s non-oil exports by 14% and income by 1% ( Ianchovichina et. al., 2001 ).6”
Trade Growth under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (2010, background): “International Trade Commission import data and work at the HS 6-digit level of aggregation.(19) The Act defines apparel products treated under AGOA”