Title: Trade structure and growth: how does Africa fair against the world?

Authors: Sibusisiwe Mchani; Andrew Phiri

Addresses: Department of Economics, Faculty of Business and Economic Studies, Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, 6031, South Africa ' Department of Economics, Faculty of Business and Economic Studies, Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth, 6031, South Africa

Abstract: We present a comparative analysis on the trade structure-growth nexus using two panel samples representing the top 10 trading African economies and the top 10 global trading economies covering the period 1995-2017. The findings from the pooled mean group estimators show disparities in the diversification/concentration-economic growth relationship between the two samples. On one hand, both diversification and concentration are found to be beneficial for short-run growth in the African sample but insignificant for the global sample. On the other hand, export concentration is harmful to long-run growth for the African sample but beneficial for long-run growth in the global sample. In further applying panel causality tests we only observe significant causal relations between export diversification/concentration and economic growth for the global sample and yet none are observed for the African sample and the policy implications of our findings are discussed.

Keywords: economic growth; export concentration; export diversification; pooled mean group estimators; pooled mean group; PMG; panel causality; African economies; global economies.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSE.2020.110278

International Journal of Sustainable Economy, 2020 Vol.12 No.2, pp.184 - 203

Received: 31 Jan 2020
Accepted: 26 May 2020
Published online: 12 Oct 2020 *

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