De-fragmenting Africa

Regional integration in Africa has long been recognised as essential to address the issues of the small economic size of many countries and the often arbitrarily drawn borders that pay little heed to the distribution of natural endowments. But, as is often noted, Africa trades little with itself, at least to the extent that is recorded in official customs statistics. For example, the share of intra-regional goods trade in total goods imports is only around 5% in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, 10% in the Economic Community of West African States and 8% in the West African Economic and Monetary Union. This compares with over 20% in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, around 35% in the North American Free Trade Agreement and more than 60% in the EU. On the other hand, intra-regional trade in MERCOSUR is about 15% of total imports and less than 8% in the Central American Common Market (see Acharya et al 2011).