The Impact of Trade Agreement on Intra-regional trade flow of goods and services within West Africa countries (The ECOWAS)

Abstract

This paper analyses impact of trade agreement on the trade flow of goods and services, the intra-regional trade volume within the Economic Community of West African States (the ECOWAS) signed in 1975, and therefore been revised in 1993; the evolution of the economic development and welfare in the production sector in west Africa by analyzing trade data of fifteen countries from 1990- 2020 collected from CEPII and World’s Bank. database. This research will analyse our variable using the Gravity econometrics Model of trade for statistical estimation. The main variables we are working with are as follow: the GDP per capita, the trade volume, the population, the distance, the language as dummy variable, the political stability and the education background. We emphasize on the real impact the distance, the language and the political stability have on inter- regional trade.in this area. Moreover, we will analyse the effectiveness of the implementation of the free trade agreement policy and its impact on the volume of trade and the flow of goods and services between the ECOWAS countries. Our goal is to analyse various variables and to point out the most pertinent enough to improve the FTA that influence positively in the short run the volume of trade exchange within the countries.