African regional integration: A problem-driven approach to delivering regional public goods

The paper focuses on the factors that determine the supply of RPGs as a way to better understand these implementation gaps, moving away from uniform thinking about regional cooperation and towards one that is more adaptive and “problem driven.” The characteristics of the different aggregator technologies—a key co-determinant along with political incentives of the availability of any RPG—are then illustrated with examples (e.g. “weakest link” for regional corridors). The RPG characteristics of the 15 flagships of the AU2063 programme are briefly presented and discussed with comments.

This paper is an extension of a thematic paper for ACET’s third Africa Transformation Report, Integrating to Transform. Thanks are due to ACET for financial support, to team members of the report, to Shanta Devarajan, other reviewers, as well as Sean Woolfrey and Philomena Apiko for comments on earlier drafts. Thanks to Bruce Ross-Larson for skilful editing. Jaime de Melo also acknowledges support from the French National Research Agency under program ANR-10-LABX-14-01. Remaining errors rest with the authors, not their respective institutions.

Citation

Byiers B,  Cazals A, Medinilla A., de Melo J. (2021) African regional integration: A problem-driven approach to delivering regional public goods, FERDI Working paper P290, May 2021