There is increasing emphasis on mainstreaming trade into national development strategies of African countries as a means to enhance their ability to harness the potential of trade for poverty reduction and better integrate into the global trading system.
While progress has been made by some countries in including trade and trade-related issues in national development documents, there is an understanding that many countries are yet to effectively integrate trade into their development strategies.
It is against this backdrop that this paper examines the experiences of three Asian countries (China, the Republic of Korea and Singapore) that have successfully used trade to engender development and draws lessons from these experiences for Africa.
The paper also argues that despite the growing interest in mainstreaming trade, no criteria have been set or defined on how to measure success. To fill up this lacuna, the paper proposes measurable criteria on how to determine whether or not African countries have successfully mainstreamed trade into their national development strategies.
