CHAPTER 4
Policy Implications
Improving the survival of African exports requires effort to make the environment in which African exporters operate friendlier through reduced trade costs and better upstream services, including, above all, better access to credit. These are standard prescriptions that would be reached by any study of African export performance, be it about entry, value, or survival, and are consistent with an agenda limiting the role of the government to setting clear rules, enforcing contracts, and providing base infrastructure. This chapter will explore the question of whether there can be any role for more proactive policies. We will see that although preferential market access seems to have a limited role to play, any encouragement to trade with neighbors and regional trade may have far-reaching consequences for the ability of African firms to gradually build the capabilities that would allow them to serve more distant and more demanding markets, through gradual export-expansion paths. However, we will also see that the very fragmentary evidence about the role of technical assistance in helping African firms cope with rising demands in terms of traceability and quality (in particular in agriculture) is ambiguous. More research is clearly needed to evaluate the impact of technical assistance, especially in view of the basic ambiguities of impact evaluation in this context. 105