Are African exports that weak? A trade in value added approach

Abstract

African countries are known to export less than any other group of countries in the world. Many studies have advanced that the main reason for this is the high level of transport costs due to the poor quality of transport infrastructures on the African continent. We first show that, depending on the estimator used, African countries as an aggregate do not necessarily trade a lower volume of gross exports than other countries on average, even though they clearly underperform in exports of final goods. This underperformance, reflected by the greater impact of bilateral trade costs such as distance on African exports of final goods compared to other countries, is not observed for African intermediate goods flows. Second, we formulate a model for trade in value added by adapting the standard gravity equation to take into account the structure of value added exports. The proposed model points up the importance of the indirect trade costs of third countries via which a country of origin's value added transits before reaching its final destination. When we control for these indirect trade costs in the value added trade estimation, the additional impact of the bilateral trade costs observed for African countries’ final goods exports is six times lower.