Integration along the Abuja road map: A progress report

Abstract

This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project on 'Industries without smokestacks', which is part of a larger research project on 'Jobs, poverty and structural change in Africa'.Abstract: This paper reviews integration among the eight African Regional Economic Communities by comparing their characteristics and progress with three other South-South Regional Integration Arrangements. Three conclusions emerge: (i) slow progress towards meeting overly ambitious objectives; (ii) small changes in the destination of trade across all Regional Economic Communities, indicative of persistent high trade costs and few new manufactures products destined for geographically close markets; and (iii) compared with other South-South Regional Integration Arrangements, the Regional Economic Communities include a high number of provisions not covered in Word Trade Organization negotiations, but these have low legal enforceability. Reasons for this slow progress are explored in the paper.

Digital connectedness and exports upgrading: Is sub‐Saharan Africa catching up?

“…These estimations, therefore, bring additional evidence to existing studies on the role of geographical distance in international trade (Blum & Goldfarb, 2006). 5 Third, we highlight a mediating effect of Internet penetration and human capital, not specific to SSA countries, which is consistent with studies highlighting the importance of digital absorptive capacity to take advantage on the digitalization process (Choi et al, 2020;de Melo & Solleder, 2022). The contribution of critical dimensions of digital absorptive capacity, such has Internet penetration and educational attainment, are investigated and found to mediate the effect of connectedness over long period, but not to explain SSA catch-up in export complexity.…”

Agenda 2063 and the Feasibility of Sustainable Development in Africa: Any Silver Bullet?

“…Notwithstanding the overall limited success of the OAU in motorizing African development, it made some serious efforts towards African development. Such efforts would include the Monrovia Declaration of 1979; the design and adoption of the Lagos Plan of Action at the OAU Extraordinary Summit in Lagos, Nigeria in 1980, as well as the Final Act of Lagos and the Abuja Treaty of 1991 (De Melo et al, 2018;Tella, 2018). The OAU was equally supportive of regional economic communities (RECs) and encouraged the formation of additional RECs to cover all the regions of the continent.…”

Digital de-industrialization, global value chains, and structural transformation: Empirical evidence from low- and middle-income countries

“…While an implicit link between digitalization and structural change can be found in some studies (e.g., Rodrik 2018;Newfarmer et al 2019), there are only a handful of studies that provide an explicit conceptualization of digitalization as a driver of structural transformation (see Matthess and Kunkel 2020;De Melo and Solleder 2022) and even more limited empirical evidence on the same. In this study, we address the research gap by empirically and simultaneously examining the impact of digitalization and GVCs on structural transformation using a cross-country panel in the period 1990-2018, combining information on 51 economies from the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, UNCTAD EORA data set, World Development Indicators, and Penn World Tables.…”