Do Institutions and Technologies Matter for Trade Openness? Empirical Evidence from African Countries

ABSTRACT

This study examines the influence of institutions, the Internet, and mobile phone usage on African countries’ trade openness. Applying various estimations for a balanced panel of data for 47 African economies over the period of 2003 to 2017, our empirical analysis arrives at the following interesting conclusions. Improvement of the institutional framework has mixed impacts on the trade relationships of African countries within the continent. Notably, internet and mobile phone usage have greater impacts on trade openness in countries that have a better institutional framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade activities
• institutions
• the Internet
• mobile phone
• technology
• panel data

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Acknowledgments

Canh Phuc Nguyen and Thanh Dinh Su received funding from the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ These aggregate indicators combine the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen, and expert survey respondents based on over 30 individual data sources produced by a variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and private sector firms. The range of values is from −2.5 to +2.5; the higher values mean higher governance quality. For further information, see for model detail: https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/.

² The appendix can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/uitj.

³ The official exchange rate is measured as domestic currencies per one USD.

⁴ All robustness checks can be provided on request.

Additional information

Funding

Canh Phuc Nguyen and Su Dinh Thanh are received funding from the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.