Unrestricted Market Access for Sub-Saharan Africa: How Much Is It Worth and Who Pays?

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Abstract
Initiatives to improve market access for the poorest countries have recently been announced by the EU, Japan and the USA. This paper assesses the impact of these initiatives and others that might be taken for a subset of 37 Sub‐Saharan African countries (SSA‐37). We find that fully unrestricted access to all the QUAD countries (EU, USA, Canada and Japan) would produce substantial gains for SSA‐37, leading to a 14% increase in non‐oil exports ($2.5 billion) and boosting real incomes in SSA‐37 by about 1%. Most of these gains would come from preferential access to the highly protected Japanese and European agricultural markets. The smallness of SSA‐37 ensures that the costs of trade diversion for the QUAD, other developing countries and the world as a whole are negligible.

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