Trade Performance of the Less Developed African Countries

Maria Paula Fontoura and Nuno Crespo ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Adopting a long term perspective, we evaluate the trade performance of less developed African countries. Besides some general trade indicators, we apply a constant market share analysis in order to decompose export performance into several components with specific economic interpretation. Our main conclusions are: (i) the sectoral specialization structure of exports has remained heavy in commodities but the composition of the basket of goods exported has changed considerably with a very strong concentration in crude oil (mainly in the last two decades), (ii) the geographical structure of exports has also changed, with an important increase of the relative importance of China and USA, (iii) the countries under analysis not only show a negative competitiveness effect, but are also penalized by their sectoral and geographical specialization, and (iv) the most favorable evolution is observed in the most recent sub-period (2000-2007), but it is insufficient to reverse the previous negative trend.

Keywords: Constant market share analysis; Trade; Less developed African countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/49193/1/MPRA_paper_49193.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Trade performance of the less developed African countries (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:49193

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().