Is Economic Integration the Solution to African Development?

In the African continent several regional integration initiatives have been launched and/or executed. These initiatives gave rise to three major regional groupings: COMESA, ECOWAS and ECCAS. Not all of these arrangements are ‘country exclusive’, in that a country may belong to one or more regional group. Integrating economies of the African continent was instituted with the expectation that an all inclusive economic Union is more efficient in addressing the political, economic and social problems of the continent. Using data from three periods: 1986, 1996 and 2005 this paper put the Union expectations in an empirical context. A paper to be presented a