Indicators to Monitor Deeper Regional Trade Integration in Africa
Stronger regional integration has been a policy priority in Africa for several decades. Countries in Africa have committed to a process of deeper integration, but have made little progress in implementing commitments and removing barriers. This rep...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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Washington, DC
2015
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/06/24581762/indicators-monitor-deeper-regional-trade-integration-africa http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22098 |
| Summary: | Stronger regional integration has been a
policy priority in Africa for several decades. Countries in
Africa have committed to a process of deeper integration,
but have made little progress in implementing commitments
and removing barriers. This report looks at the monitoring
of regional integration in Africa and argues that more
effective monitoring processes for existing integration
arrangements can help to raise the profile of the prevailing
implementation deficits and provide policy makers and civil
society with the necessary information to push for
corrective action. Currently, most integration monitoring
systems are scorecard-based compliance assessments. To
obtain information on the impact of integration policies on
ordinary traders, indicators of trade transaction costs are
required. These can be indirect measures of trade volume
changes or price differences, or direct estimates of the
various trade cost components. The overall aim of this
report is to explore indicators that capture the impact of
regional policy reforms on trade transaction costs for
ordinary traders, with a focus on indicators that can be
linked to the implementation of specific policy measures.
The report is organized as follows: section one gives
introduction. Section two briefly discusses integration
monitoring systems and related indicators in general.
Section three presents an overview of regional trade
indicators that are currently used by policy makers in
Sub-Saharan Africa. Section four discusses the three main
types of indicators, compliance with integration
commitments, outcomes indirectly and at an aggregate level,
and capturing specific trade cost components either directly
or indirectly. Section five focuses on generating new
indicators from new types of data sources; and section six
discusses the way forward. |
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