IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cgd/wpaper/208.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are Borders Barriers? The Impact of International and Internal Ethnic Borders on Agricultural Markets in West Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Jenny C. Aker, Michael W. Klein, Stephen A. O’Connell and Muzhe Yang

Abstract

This paper addresses two important economic issues for Africa: the contribution of national borders and ethnicity to market segmentation and integration between and within countries. Market pair regression analysis provides evidence of higher conditional price dispersion for both a grain and a cash crop between markets separated by the Niger-Nigeria border than between two markets located in the same country. A regressiondiscontinuity analysis also confirms a significant price change at the international border. The international border effect is lower, however, if the cross-border markets share a common ethnicity. Ethnicity is also linked to higher price dispersion within Niger; we find a significant intranational border effect between markets in different ethnic regions of the country. This suggests that ethnic similarities diminishing international border effects could enhance international market integration, and ethnic differences could contribute to intranational market segmentation in sub-Saharan Africa. We provide suggestive evidence that the primary mechanism behind the internal border effect is related to the role of ethnicity in facilitating access to credit in agricultural markets. We argue that the results are not driven by differences in price volatility or observables across borders.

Suggested Citation

  • Jenny C. Aker, Michael W. Klein, Stephen A. O’Connell and Muzhe Yang, 2010. "Are Borders Barriers? The Impact of International and Internal Ethnic Borders on Agricultural Markets in West Africa," Working Papers 208, Center for Global Development.
    • Handle: RePEc:cgd:wpaper:208
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424038/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Brown, M.E. & et al. [+21], 2015. "Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System," USDA Miscellaneous 337546, United States Department of Agriculture.
    2. Svetlana Andrianova & Badi H. Baltagi & Panicos Demetriades & David Fielding, 2017. "Ethnic Fractionalization, Governance and Loan Defaults in Africa," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 79(4), pages 435-462, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Africa; border effects; agriculture; regression discontinuity design;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
    • Q1 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:cgd:wpaper:208. 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: Publications Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cgdevus.html .

    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.