Despite regional integration having been a goal for sometime, he said much improvement is needed.
“If you look at the trade in goods and services, that is still low. Intra-Africa trade is still of the order of 15 percent compared to other regions where it is much higher, many times higher. Much of it has to do with weak manufacturing bases that you find in most African countries. So the countries don’t have much to trade with each other. A lot of them will still produce natural resources, which are merely exported without much beneficiation [processing to add value]. That’s part of the reason. But there are other areas where Africa has made a lot of progress, such as in intra-Africa investment.”
This includes banks and mobile telephone companies.
Ncube said that greater regional integration can act as a buffer for possible future economic crises.
“Our research shows that those regions where the quality of integration is of higher quality, those regions were better at absorbing the shocks of the global economic crisis. And this is particularly the case with [the] East Africa region – around Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and so forth. That region absorbed the crisis better that other regions and we think integration – at least our research shows – was critical in that,” he said.
He added that greater regional integration will prepare the continent to be – what he calls – the next factory to the world. That can happen he says, when wages start rising in countries, such as China and Vietnam.
最新
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25