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A lot of existing literature on African regional integration bloc has ignored the effects of regional economic integration by dealing with disaggregated data. This is forgetting that there is a welfare impact of trade creation versus trade diversion of regional trade in Africa. With this in mind, this article analyses the effects of regional economic integration on regional trade in Africa by concentrating on five regional economic communities. Using panel data and fixed effects estimator, the article employs an augmented Gravity Model. The results show that the creation of the African Union contributed greatly to the intra-regional trade, inter-regional trade, and trade with the rest of the world. Therefore, regional economic integration should be considered as an aspect of the strategy for Africa's development and growth, and that the benefits of such integration are essential as the central pillar of African development. Partner states should commit themselves to good governance and create a stable political environment which will lead to an increase in regional economic activities. As a result, poverty levels will be reduced leading to a high standard of life in Africa as a result of the welfare effects of this integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable Crop Intensification (SCI) has been recognized as a means to increase crop productivity and improve rural livelihoods by governments and development partners in Sub Saharan Africa. Designing and implementing policies that address the bottlenecks to SCI interventions is pertinent to address low crop productivity. However, little attention is geared towards analyzing the existing policies and examining their provision in addressing the key challenges to SCI. Based on analysis of policy documents and perception of key policy actors in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, this paper looks at the level of policy support for SCI in Eastern Africa. Results indicate that lack of incentives to invest in SCI, and poor capacity of agricultural extension system in technology development and dissemination constrain implementation of policies supporting SCI. Mistrust among policy actors over ‘hidden’ interest of international donors in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and failure to have open discussion to clarify the involvement of multinational companies in regional trade hamper the implementation of policies supporting SCI. Policies lack emphasis on protecting farmers rights' over land tenure and local varieties, posing a challenge to policy harmonization and regional trade. Therefore, developing incentive mechanisms for SCI, and strengthening the capacity of agricultural extension system to meet the requirements of SCI are required. Encouraging public dialogue over the national and regional interests over involvement of multinational companies in regional trade and on GMOs could enhance the acceptability of the policies supporting SCI by many of the agricultural actors. Strengthening farmer groups at different levels could also play important role in protecting farmers' rights in regional trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main shortcomings flaw the estimation of gravity model in previous studies that examined the trade-creating effects of African Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs). First, these studies fail to account for the multilateral resistance term. This omission makes the estimates from standard gravity model bias and inconsistent. Second, there is a significant proportion of zero trade flows, however, these studies also fail to account for them properly. They use either the Tobit model or replace zero flows with arbitrary small values. Apart from these problems, they also exhibit considerable heterogeneity in the RTA effects on trade. In this paper, a meta-analysis of previous empirical studies is conducted to derive a combined effect size and also to explain the heterogeneity. In addition, I use the gravity model to compare the trade-creating effect of the main African RTAs. Using the gravity model, I compare the estimation methods of previous studies to the Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator that tackles the zero flows. From the meta-analysis, I find a general positive effect of African RTAs of about 27%–32%. A comparative assessment of the RTAs using gravity model shows a striking heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]