Pourquoi le commerce intra -CEEAC est-il si faible ?

Intra-ECCAS trade is the lowest of all Regional Economic Communities and is estimated to be less than 1,5% of its total trade. The purpose of this paper is to provide some explanations. To achieve this, we focus on the recent theoretical and empirical developments and apply the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator to an augmented gravity model on a panel of ECCAS members? countries and their partners, over the time period 1995-2014. We control specifically the model for the multilateral and bilateral resistances, intra-national distance, infrastructures and institutions. After empirical tests, we obtain the following major findings: i) The effect of countries? belonging to ECCAS had a marginal effect on their bilateral trade; ii) the remoteness, both multilateral and bilateral are uncertainty linked to ECCAS bilateral trade; iii) the poor quality of infrastructures weakens the bilateral trade in ECCAS, and that effect tends to be fostered by the poor quality of the institutions. But, the increase in bilateral trade would be significant if the rationalization process is effective, if countries implement necessary reforms for a custom union and then single market, if they invest in infrastructures and build inclusive institutions that could improve business climate environment and help policy makers to apply decisions.