Trade and economic performance: does Africa's fragmentation matter? / Tony Venables, Paul Collier

Paper delivered at the ABCDE conference, held in Cape Town, South Africa, June 9-11, 2008. - The population of sub-Saharan Africa, in comparison to that of South Asia, is heavily fragmented into some 54 independent countries. This paper asks whether such fragmentation has economic consequences and suggests that both private economic activity and the provision of public goods benefit from powerful scale economies that confer advantages on the South Asian model. Paradoxically, although as a result Africa has a greater need than other regions for supra-national power structures, it has made far less progress towards regional unity.