The Effect of Trade Liberalization on Exports, Imports and Balance of Payment: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

We explore dynamic non-stationarity panel data estimators namely, mean group (MG) and pooled mean group (PMG) for investigating the extent to which trade policies such as trade liberalisation and tariff rates matter to trade performance using the case of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We found that increasing tariffs has the potential of particularly worsening export growth in SSA but increasing openness via liberalisation policy is likely to spur decline in the import dependence of the SSA economy. Thus, we concluded that while trade liberalisation seems to exhibit no significant impact on export growth in SSA, the same policy may yet be explored to encourage decline in the region’s import activities, particularly those import activities that might threaten the growth of domestic industries.