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...

The international discussion of Trump's dispute over import tariffs for steel, aluminum and even cars is so far focused on the big global players. However, African countries in particular could suffer from the planned punitive tariffs, analogous to the famous African proverb, "When elephants...

In several African regions, economic integration has successfully reduced tariff protection by freezing the opportunity to raise applied tariffs against fellow integration partners above those promised. In this paper, we examine whether the regional tariff commitments on the continent have come...

Africa's export performance has been extremely poor in recent years. Its share of world exports has declined and most countries are highly dependent on a narrow range of primary commodities for export earnings. This paper looks at factors that affect the export performance of manufacturing...