The present study proposes a quantitative measure of the concept of trade policy space and investigates its impact on countries' economic growth and transitional convergence in terms of economic development. In this study, trade policy space is considered as the room for maneuver available to a government once its current trade policy departs from the structural domestic and international factors that could influence the trade policy. The transitional convergence is defined as the catch up of a country's real per capita income with the world's average real per capita income. The empirical analysis covering 150 countries from 1995 to 2015 shows that although the trade policy space exerts a positive impact on economic growth, this positive effect depends on countries' structural policies. Furthermore, the study results indicate that the trade policy space exerts a positive and significant effect on transitional convergence, and the greater the trade policy space, the higher is the transitional convergence.

This paper assesses the East African Community's (EAC) effectiveness in integrating member countries by lowering total bilateral trade costs. First, information is provided on the size and distribution of bilateral trade costs among 16 manufacturing industries over the period 1990~2012 for a sample comprising five EAC countries and 87 of their trade partners. The estimates indicate that it costs on average three times more for an EAC country to trade manufactured goods with another EAC country than to trade those goods domestically. The estimates also indicate that it costs on average eight times more for an EAC country to trade manufactured goods with a non-EAC country than to trade those goods domestically. This paper then shows the importance of natural and policy-related factors in determining the trade costs.

The current study investigates the evolutionary path of divestment risk of MNE subsidiaries in a regionally integrated area. Although descriptive statistics tend to indicate an inverse U-shaped path of divestment risk for the whole post-war era (1960~2015), including the protectionism period (1960~1980), the Kaplan-Meier survivor curve is monotonically decreasing across the three successive stages of EU integration (1981~2015). Moreover, the econometric findings exhibit that divestment risk stabilization at the deep integration stage is due to investment in product differentiation and human capital and not to factor differentials such as tariffs and wage costs. To our best knowledge, this is the first study that explores the evolution of foreign divestment risk in a gradually increasing integrated environment.

This study uses a structural gravity model to examine how regional integration affected cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in Africa during the period from 2000 to 2014. We found that customs unions in Africa, specifically the Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) and the East African Community (EAC) were significant drivers of M&As by firms within the unions but not for those outside the unions, perhaps the result of the relatively small size of these economic blocs. The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and Southern African Development Community (SADC) do not appear to encourage either intra- or extra- regional M&A flows. These findings suggest that the depth of regional integration determines intra-regional M&A flows in Africa. Therefore, African governments should strengthen existing economic integration agreements to benefit more from cross-border M&A flows from within the regional blocs and to attract foreign investment from non-member countries.

Using data from 40 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 1980 to 2015, the present study examines the effects of globalization and its dimensions on economic growth by distinguishing the de jure and de facto aspects. Through second-generation panel data tests, the study analyzes the cross-sectional dependence between the countries studied and adopts an appropriate methodology for its effectiveness treatment. The study finds an economic growth effect for the overall globalization in SSA countries. It also demonstrates that de jure globalization increases economic growth, while de facto aspect undermines this growth. However, this is still evidence that de jure, de facto economic globalization, and de jure social globalization promote economic growth. De facto social globalization and de jure political globalization remain ineffective, while de facto political dimension of globalization hinders growth.

This paper studies the relationship between the size of the fiscal multiplier and the degree of capital mobility in some Latin American countries. Mundell's (1963) and Fleming's (1962) models show that this effect could be very large or small (close to zero) depending on the exchange rate and the degree of capital mobility, and the potency of a fiscal policy is inversely correlated with the degree of capital mobility. Based on Mora's (2013) model, we argue that the multiplier might not be negatively correlated with capital mobility in these countries. In other words, the potency of fiscal policy could be small because the degree of capital mobility in Latin American countries is quite low. The empirical findings support our hypothesis. We have found that the size of the fiscal multiplier tends to increase or (at least) to remain around 1.40 in these countries in the short run; however, in the long run, this effect tends to decrease significantly to 0.34. These results also suggest that the effectiveness of fiscal policies in Latin American countries are still large but could be larger if they become more financially integrated with the rest of the world.

Time-series data from 1980 to 2016 were analyzed to estimate the impact of local currency (i.e., CFA Franc) devaluation on Cameroon's trade balance. The estimation of short-run and long-run relationships between the variables using Johansen cointegration and the vector error correction model (VECM) as a mean to examine whether the Marshall-Lerner condition (MLC) and the J-curve phenomenon hold in the case of Cameroon yielded mitigated results: Although the MLC is not met for Cameroon, as the sum of the elasticities of demand for exports and imports is not greater than unity, the empirical analysis results provide evidence of correction over the long-run of a prior deterioration of the trade balance at an adjustment speed of 81.17%, thus supporting the existence of the J-curve pattern.