Funded by United States Agency for International Development

The views and interpretations in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily of the affiliated institutions. This paper examines the potential for success for trade-focused regional integration agreements in Sub-Saharan Africa, with particular focus on Southern Africa. The paper surveys the existing literature on regional integration, and attempts to distill the most relevant lessons about success and failure for the current integration initiatives in the region. It finds that there is little reason to expect significant economic gains form formal trade agreements at this time. Such agreements, in and of themselves, are unlikely to yield appreciable benefits unless they are preceded by decisions within member countries to follow more general open trade strategies. Indeed, it is possible that they could be detrimental to the economies involved, either because they might encourage import substitution or a regional basis (as has happened in the past) or simply because they absorb scarce administrative and financial resources. More open trade policies coupled with more disciplined fiscal and monetary policies (and hence more economic stability), perhaps augmented by regional cooperation efforts on transportation and communication infrastructure, appears to be a more promising initial strategy. Author Steven Radelet is an Institute Associate at HIID and lecturer on economics. He served as adviso