When asked why the level of intra-regional trade in West Africa is low despite regional integration efforts, the literature highlights the poorly diversified structure of economies, the non-application of community arrangements, the inconsistency or mismanagement of trade policies, supply...

This paper investigates bilateral trade flows and the level of openness across ECOWAS-15 nations for the period of 1981-2013 using Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML), fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and canonical cointegrating regression (CCR). Comparing the results, the...