Regional integration in sub-Saharan Africa : experience and prospects

After independence, every sub - Saharan African country, without exception, joined one or more regional integration schemes. Regional integration would have enabled the subcontinent to attain economic growth and prosperity by allowing individual countries to overcome the barriers of desperately small size and poor human and physical capital endowment - thus breaking away from the colonial pattern of trade, often characterized by a heavy reliance on an undiversified and vulnerable structure of exports. Despite many attempts, and the investment of many scarce resources, to create multinational institutions, sub - Saharan African markets remain surprisingly isolated from each other. Production and exports in most of these countries show few basic structural changes. Their growth record - especially in the past decade - has been abysmal. The author's objective is to analyze the reasons for the huge gap between expectations and reality and to evaluate regional integration's prospects in sub - Saharan Africa. Considering the economic characteristics of sub - Saharan African countries and their trade relations with world partners, the author argues that too much was expected from regional integration - especially the integration of goods markets. Benefits that theoretically could have been derived from regional integration went unattained for complex reasons, foremost among which is the disparity in the partners'economic development and the ensuring uneven distribution of gains from regional integration. This disparity prevented any meaningful step toward integrating sub - Saharan African markets. The author argues that despite a renewed interest in regionalism in the world, it remains unlikely that regional integration as pursued in sub - Saharan Africa so far will succeed any more in the future. Regional integration in sub - Saharan Africa can bear gradual fruit only if costly protectionist and distortionary policies are abandoned for more market-oriented, transparent, balanced economic policies. The disparity among sub - Saharan African countries that has hindered the liberalization of goods markets is unlikely to disappear in the short run, the author argues, so the emphasis in sub - Saharan Africa should shift from the integration of goods markets to the coordination of macroeconomic and microeconomic policies, the harmonization of administrative rules and regulations, and the joint provision of public goods. Such steps are likely to make sub - Saharan African markets more attractive to domestic and foreign investors and to bring about economic growth.