Trade Liberalization and Agricultural Growth in Africa: A friend or foe?

Author(s)

Stephen Oppong , Prof. Jiang Xinying , Francis Amoako , Prince Badu-Botah , Stephen Addai-Dansoh ,

Download Full PDF Pages: 122-132 | Views: 936 | Downloads: 243 | DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3613399

Volume 8 - November 2019 (11)

Abstract

With the aim of assessing the impact that trade liberalization has on agricultural growth as in value added in Africa, the study uses trade openness as a proxy measure of trade liberalization to ascertain whether it has a substantial impact on agricultural value added in Africa. The data for the study were sampled from 1996 to 2017 and were sourced from World Development Indicators and Worldwide Governance Indicators for a panel of 34 African countries. The study’s findings confirm that there is an inverse relationship between trade liberalization and agricultural growth in Africa and it also witnessed evidence of bidirectional homogeneous causality between agricultural export performance, trade liberalization, and employment in the agricultural sector, economic growth, government effectiveness and agricultural growth. However, increasing the agricultural export share in Africa could result in agricultural growth. The study used GLS random effects, fixed effects, generalized linear model and multivariate regressions to analyze its data in drawing its conclusion.

Keywords

Trade liberalization; Africa; Agricultural growth; Generalized linear model; Multivariate regression

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