Make Trade Not War? - Philippe Martin, Thierry Mayer, and Mathias Thoenig (2008)

Extract

[...] (2020) Trade Pact to Give Africa $450 Billion Boost, World Bank Says, Bloomberg, Retrieved 14 November 2020. Shitero S. (2018), Africa Opens Up Borders to Free Trade, Fair Observer, Retrieved 14 November 2020. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Economic Development in Africa Report 2019: Made in Africa - Rules of Origin for Enhanced Intra-African Trade October 2019. World Bank. (2019) The African Continental Free Trade Area: Economic and Distributional Effects. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-1559-1. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 IGO, Retrieved 14 November 2020. [...]

[...] The EU's trade relationship with ACP countries is governed by the Cotonou Partnership Agreement signed in 2000. The partnership expires at the end of 2020 and the parties are currently negotiating its successor. For ACP countries, the combination of advantageous economic partnerships offered by the EU and high barriers to intra-regional trade makes distant EU countries more attractive trade partners than neighboring countries. Additionally, ACP countries, particularly in the Sahel region and West Africa, have limited diplomatic relationships due to border and ethnic disputes inherited from colonial times. [...]

[...] The Sahel region has made important peace and security gains over the past two decades, yet the region remains unstable. The area is plagued by an on-and-off civil war in South Sudan, political contestations in Kenya and several armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Extreme poverty and inadequate infrastructure are key characteristics of Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019, the region only contributed to global GDP despite accounting for 12% of the global population. Sub-Saharan countries are also fairly dependent on external trade, reflected by the 33% ratio of exports to GDP (UNCTAD, 2019). [...]

[...] The results confirm that globalization increases the probability of a bilateral military conflict with the effects weakening as distance between countries increases. II. Potential limitations 1. Range of 'conflict': The 'conflict' defined in their hypothesis, that 'the absence of peace disrupts trade and therefore puts trade gains at risk', is limited to the military field. This is good for the authors who wanted to dig out a specific conclusion by narrowing down this definition but it also means that the conclusions are limited in scope. [...]

[...] These regional trade agreements have proven ineffective as internal trade accounts for only 15% of the total amount of trade in Africa, compared with 58% in Asia and more than 70% in Europe (World Bank, 2019). Although all African countries are party to the AfCFTA, its economic benefits will not be distributed equally. Several economists have pointed out that relatively developed coastal countries, such as Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, stand to gain the most from the AfCFTA while the landlocked Sahel economies may be left behind (World Bank, 2019). [...]