Oxford Economic Papers: Growth spillovers and market access in Africa

How much do countries in Africa benefit from their neighbours’ growth? This paper shows that neighbouring growth increases a country’s ‘foreign market access’ (FMA)—boosting export demand and increasing local output. Using luminosity data to exploit within-country variation, I find that between 1992 and 2012 domestic output responded to increases in FMA with an elasticity in the range 0.3 to 0.6. By reducing trade costs, countries can increase their FMA, and so increase the spillover of neighbouring growth into domestic growth.

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