GROWTH AND ECONOMIC INTEGRATION IN AFRICA

Growth and Economic Integration in Africa

--Dr.Debesh Bhowmik

The process of economic integration in Africa has been progressing quickly.While world’s growth rate is dwindling Africa’s growth rate is moving forward.World financial crisis had less effects in the trading and monetary blocs of Africa although the growth rates fell down marginally in 2009 from 2008 but a few countries showed negative growth rate as shown in EU and USA.The most successful blocs,namely ECOWAS and SACU have achieved more than 6% growth rate during 2004-2014.The exception is that the other successful bloc titled WAEMU had a good progress but showed less growth than ECOWAS and SACU. All the three blocs have made considerable progress on creating common currency.The trading blocs,SADC and EAC-5 which are based common rules of trade have shown more than 7% and 5% GDP growth rate respectively during 2004-2014.The COMESA, the sub-saharan African bloc had a stable average growth rate of more than 5%.The countries who are successful in forming CFA franc zone had recovered growth rate quickly after the crisis and crossed more than 6%.So, we may infer that the growth rate of GDP of African integrated blocs have achieved convergence.

The GDP per capita trends did not show as like as GDP growth rate because high population growth in African regions. Yet the central tendency towards convergence has not changed too much,even, the financial crisis did not turn the economies into recession. Economic and financial reform and other strong macro fundamentals helped the African blocs such that the trends of per capita GDP growth did not diverge from the equilibrium path .The ECOWAS and SACU had shown and average per capita GDP growth rate of 3-4% per annum while WAEMU had a good recovery including SADC but COMESA who had achieved a little progress on monetary integration grew more than 3% on per capita.  However, some blocs could not avoid negative per capita growth up till 2010.We can be sure about the shock on growth towards the process of convergence in the African regional trading blocs.The growth rate and per capita growth rate of GDP in the blocs of Africa gave a good signal and positive impact  in economic integration on the road map of single currency in African blocs where SACU and ECOWAS performed well but the performance of WAEMU is praiseworthy.