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Connecting Landlocked Developing Countries to Markets
from traditional natural-resource exports has been more limited. Their overall foreign exchange earnings have been at much lower levels than in economies of similar size with direct access to the sea.
Eastern and Southern Africa One striking feature of the picture in Eastern and Southern Africa, clearly evidenced in table A3.1, is the still low role of exports (less than 20 percent of gross domestic product [GDP]) in all five of the East African LLDCs, which together have some 140 million inhabitants. Another is the very limited scale of exports from the region’s LLDCs into the larger, richer coastal economies of Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania. Growth of international trade in East Africa has suffered from periodic major problems in overland infrastructure maintenance and port congestion, just as it has benefited in southern Africa from the strong transport infrastructure and competitive organization of road freight services in the countries of SACU (Southern African Customs Union) and their neighbors. Relatively strong development records over the past 10 to15 years have been established by Lesotho and Uganda. Trade has been a major factor in their success, with the particularly noteworthy recent success of Uganda in increasing manufactured exports to inland Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Sudan (Selassie 2008). In Ethiopia, too, trade growth has benefited from the policy attention given to it. The relatively good trade performance of Ethiopia, Lesotho, and Uganda is reflected in their comparatively high LPI scores, due especially to good scores for timeliness and competitive local logistics costs. Compared to other resource-poor African countries, all three also score high on the Trading across Borders dimension of the Doing Business surveys. The latest round of the latter implies that a main requirement to achieving muchneeded further expansion of exports in these countries may be to address some broader common legal obstacles to business development.
Western and Central Africa The five LLDCs of Western and Central Africa (table A3.2) have a combined population of some 55 million. Apart from the Central African Republic, they have generally achieved somewhat stronger growth over the past 15 years than their counterparts in Eastern Africa. However, with the notable exception of Mali, their role in international trade has tended to decrease. Exports as a share of GDP have dropped in three of the countries, to well below 20 percent. The LLDCs have made little or no progress in diversification of export commodities or in exploitation of