What Constrains Africa’s Exports?

By Caroline Freund, N. Rocha. 2011

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Africa's share of global exports has dropped by 50 percent over the last three decades. To stem this decline, aid for trade to the region has increased rapidly in recent years. Assistance can target improvements in three important components of trade facilitation: transit times, documentation, and ports and customs. Of these, transit delays have the most economically and statistically significant effect on exports. Specifically, a one day reduction in inland travel times leads to a 7 percent increase in exports, after controlling for the standard determinants of trade and potential endogeneity. Put another way, a one day reduction in inland travel times translates into a 2 percentage point decrease in all importing-country tariffs. By contrast, longer delays in the other areas have a far smaller impact on trade. Large transit delays are relatively more harmful because they are associated with high (within-country) variation, making delivery targets difficult to meet. Finally, the results imply that transit times are primarily about institutional features- such as border delays, road quality, fleet class, and competition and security- and not geography.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f682853ce2f567de757386e701c93868069f21b9

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Citations in the corpus

Trade effects of the New Silk Road: A gravity analysis (2019, background): “Other papers focusing on the Sub‐Saharan Africa region find that a one‐day reduction in inland travel times leads to a 7 percent increase in exports (Freund and Rocha, 2011).”
Export Performance and Trade Facilitation Reform: Hard and Soft Infrastructure (2010, background): “Third, we follow Freund and Rocha (2010) and restrict exports to new products to deal with reverse causality of exports to trade facilitation, as trade in new goods cannot affect investment in ‘hard infrastructure’ or institutional reform.”