Paper Title
THE IMPACT OF WAR, CONFLICT, POLITICAL INSTABILITY AND PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY ON INTRAREGIONAL TRADE IN ECOWAS
Abstract
Conflict in Africa poses a major challenge to United Nations efforts designed to ensure global peace, prosperity and human rights for all. West Africa is said to be one of the world’s most unstable regions with the countries being plagued for decades by political tension, violence and wars since their independence in the early 1960s. In the last few decades, the transformation from inter-state to intra-state conflict in West Africa brought a number of its economies to near collapse. As a result, the sub-region’s security environment has often been viewed as one that continues to be pre¬carious and unstable. The results of these conflicts include the destruc¬tion of lives and property, the internal dis¬placement of people, a region-wide refugee crisis, poverty, disease often leading to public health emergency, the proliferation of small arms and light weaponsand banditry, all of which are potential obstacles to trade in the subregion. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of war, political instability and public health emergency on intraregional trade in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). With panel data from the fifteen ECOWAS countries, we estimate the gravity model over the period 1990 to 2020 using the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood with high dimensional fixed effects (ppmlhdfe) technique. Our findings revealed a significant negative relationship between war, political instability and public health emergency and intraregional trade in ECOWAS. Apart from the rarity of this study, the policy implication of our findings is that ECOWAS authority and African union (AU) need a sustainable conflict resolution plan at the subregion and the continent in order to achieve the intraregional trade ambitions of the ECOWAS free trade agreement (EFTA) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) for a successful implementation of the African Agenda 2063.
Keywords - ECOWAS Trade, War and Conflict, Political Instability, African Integration, Gravity Model.