There has been considerable research on the effect of democracy on trade openness since the 1980s when development strategies toward free trade and democracy were rapidly adopted in developing countries. Most studies have focused on Asian, Latin American, and former soviet bloc countries and few...

Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) have been advocated as one way of securing trade liberalization by the IMF and World Bank. The study uses the gravity model of bilateral trade flows to empirically investigate the effects of RTAs on intra-regional trade on a set of 46 Sub-Saharan African (SSA)...