Structural Barriers to Trade in Africa

The economic performance of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the past two decades has been disappointing. The initial explanation for this poor performance focussed on deficient macroeconomic policies. However a number of SSA countries have undertaken and sustained a reasonable measure of macroeconomic reform and still see no significant expansion in the growth of manufactured exports. This suggests that a stable, credible, and consistent macroeconomic environment may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for export growth. This paper reviews the literature dealing with other constraints, including poor infrastructure, lack of appropriate human capital, a failure to develop a variety of export support services, and the impact of an unresponsive civil service. We conclude that while there are clearly numerous structural barriers to exports in SSA, no systematic analysis has been undertaken that would assist policy-makers in determining which constraints are most important. Joseph J. Stern, Institute Fellow at HIID, currently resides in Indonesia where he serves as Project Coordinator for HIID Indonesia projects. He was previously resident in Malaysia, Ghana, and Pakistan. Mary Kay Gugerty is a doctoral student in the Program in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University.