Achieving sustainable development in Africa: to what extent trade facilitation matter*?

ABSTRACT

Despite the extensive literature on trade facilitation and economic development, little is known about the empirical nexus of trade facilitation and sustainable development. This article analyses the role of trade facilitation in achieving sustainable development in Africa with a focus on the sustainable environment captured by carbon dioxide emissions. By employing two-stage least square and the system generalized method of moment estimators on 36 African countries over the period 2007–2019, the main results reveal a significant positive relationship between trade facilitation and sustainable environment. Moreover, our results support the inverted U-shaped relationship between GDP and CO2 emissions (Environmental Kuznets Curve theory) and between trade facilitation and CO2 emissions in Africa. Our findings suggest that African countries’ model of facilitating trade should actively build on the low-carbon development of hard and soft infrastructures.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade facilitation
• sustainable environment
• two-stage least square
• Africa

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F13
• F14
• Q56

Disclosure statement

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

Disclaimer

The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions they represent.

Notes

¹ In this paper we use this definition which integrates both hard and soft infrastructures for trade facilitation.

² Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Chad, Congo DRC, Ivory Coast, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

³ See the baseline results with fixed effects in Appendix 5.