Forcing Africa to open up to trade:is it worth it?

This study investigates the relationship between openness and growth for a sample of 34 African countries over the period 1960-2003. Unlike previous research on the subject we use novel time series techniques concentrated around panel unit root, panel cointegration and panel causality tests, which are more powerful for inference. In addition, the structural relationship is estimated by dynamic OLS. In contrast to previous analyses, the empirical findings reveal a negative and significant impact of openness on output growth and causality that runs only from openness to growth.