IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/intecj/v34y2020i4p571-598.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Impact of Agricultural Trade Liberalization on Agricultural Total Factor Productivity Growth in Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Regret Sunge
  • Nicholas Ngepah

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of agricultural trade liberalization on agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Africa using panel data for 13 countries from 2005 to 2016. Our contribution is two-fold. Firstly, we analyse the impact of domestic agriculture support in the spirit of the Agreement on Agriculture. Secondly, we draw attention to the South–South versus South–North debate to the agriculture sector. We examine the impact of trade by source, split between trade within and outside Africa. We compute TFP growth for maize and rice using the Malmquist-data envelopment analysis approach. We then use the dynamic fixed effects approach to estimate panel auto-regressive-distributed-lag models. TFP computations show falling growth rates for both maize and rice. Evidence suggests that domestic agriculture support measures have positive output effects but negative productivity effects. We find that reducing trade-distorting agriculture support coupled with good governance significantly increases TFP growth. Accordingly, we appeal that domestic agriculture support is refocused from producer payments to infrastructure development. Furthermore, we document that South–South trade productivity gains match and can surpass South-North Trade. Hence we emphasize increasing intra-Africa agriculture trade.

Suggested Citation

  • Regret Sunge & Nicholas Ngepah, 2020. "The Impact of Agricultural Trade Liberalization on Agricultural Total Factor Productivity Growth in Africa," International Economic Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(4), pages 571-598, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:intecj:v:34:y:2020:i:4:p:571-598
    DOI: 10.1080/10168737.2020.1836671
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10168737.2020.1836671
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/10168737.2020.1836671?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jianxu Liu & Xiaoqing Li & Yansong Li & Jirakom Sirisrisakulchai & Xuefei Kang & Jiande Cui, 2024. "Decomposition and Driving Factors of Total Factor Productivity of Food Crops in the Yellow River Basin, China," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 14(4), pages 1-24, March.
    2. Espoir, Delphin Kamanda & Bannor, Frank & Sunge, Regret, 2021. "Intra-Africa agricultural trade, governance quality and agricultural total factor productivity: Evidence from a panel vector autoregressive model," EconStor Preprints 235617, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    3. Nick Vink, 2022. "African agricultural development: How are we contributing?," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 53(4), pages 540-562, July.
    4. Liu, Zhen & Zhang, Meiling & Li, Qiuming & Zhao, Xing, 2023. "The impact of green trade barriers on agricultural green total factor productivity: Evidence from China and OECD countries," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 319-331.
    5. Lindikaya W. Myeki & Yonas T. Bahta & Nicolette Matthews, 2022. "Exploring the Growth of Agricultural Productivity in AFRICA: A Färe-Primont Index Approach," Agriculture, MDPI, vol. 12(8), pages 1-17, August.
    6. Wenwu Zhang & Jiayin Wang & Xi Ou, 2024. "Trade liberalization, city size, and urban wage premium: evidence from China’s city and individual micro-data," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-11, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:intecj:v:34:y:2020:i:4:p:571-598. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RIEJ20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.