The majority of African countries implemented import liberalisation in the 1990s. This paper explores factors that may explain the pattern of protection and of tariff reform. We consider political economy explanations, motivated specifically by the Grossman and Helpman (1994) model of protection...

In the 1980’s and 1990’s many African countries liberalised their trade policy, although since the mid 1990s there are countries that did not alter tariffs. This allows us to analyse the effects of trade liberalisation on the change in imports using Difference-in-Differences techniques that...

This paper applies panel data methods to a simple imperfect substitutes model to estimate import demand elasticities for ten African countries. The elasticities are estimated at three levels of aggregation. Firstly, we generate aggregate elasticities for each country. Secondly, we use...