Recent research indicates that the level of intra-African trade is low relative to what is observed in other continents and relative to the potential of African economies.
The continent's weak regional trade performance has been ascribed to factors ranging from limited supply capacities and multiple non-convertible national currencies to high trade barriers and infrastructural bottlenecks.
While the impacts of these factors have been studied in the literature, the roles of product concentration and similarities in industrial structures across countries in explaining intra-African trade have not been addressed using a suitable econometric methodology.
The present paper fills this gap. It finds that product concentration impedes intra-African trade while similarities in industrial structures between country pairs enhance it.
