The African Regional Groups and International Trade

Over the last years the regional integration efforts intensified all over the world. The growth of regionalism has been encouraged by the recent rules of the World Trade Organization in the last two decades. Regional integration agreements are suitable for both developed and developing countries. Many worlds’ regions witnessed the positive output of the regional agreement (for example Europe and the European Union). Due to that the regional integration has been seen as a way toward regional economic and political stability. However, at the present time, economic drive is concentrated by regions, specifically in Asia. This continent is an example of faster intra-regional trade grown that can lead to gradual economic development. African regional groups do not follow the same model and the question is why the intra-regional trade does not help to improve the economic and social conditions of the member states. Another question is why the intra-regional trade is not preferred. For example compare to Asia, just minimum of the foreign trade is changed intra-regionally. Despite the fact that Africa has a long history of the regional integration attempts, most of these efforts have brought about only very limited achievement. At this time there are about 15 regional integration groups in Africa. These groups or better to call them regional agreement take different forms from preferential trading agreement to custom union. In this paper, we examine the role of the trade of different African regional groups from different points. The aim of this paper is to analyze the foreign trade of African regional groups. The problem of regional African agreements is low specialization of the member states and also homogenous products. Due to these two facts most of the African countries are not competitive at the African regional market and also at the international market. First of all we review the level and complexity of protection in the chosen regional groups. The second stage is to define the net impact of the trade flows between member states of the selected regional groups. To estimate the empirical evidence, we would compare the import and export of different kinds of products (defined by trade nomenclature) for member states and also for chosen regional groups. To acquire more useful results for regional concentration we will use the trade concentration ratio (the trade intensity index). The index has to be accustomed to the relative position of the country or regional group in the international trade. The adjusted trade intensity index should show the concentration of trade within and between regional trade agreements. The final results should show the impact of regional integration agreement on African countries and also if one of the factors of the African slow economic growth is caused by the composition of trade. Pieces of knowledge introduced in this paper resulted from solution of an institutional research intention MSM 6046070906 „Economics of resources of Czech agriculture and their efficient use in frame of multifunctional agri-food systems“.