66 Africa in the New Trade Environment
8. In addition to simple observation and because traditional inference is not feasible, we undertake placebo tests to check the fitness of our model. We also estimate the root mean square error before treatment to evaluate the fit of the estimated synthetic control to the observed data. As a result, we dropped countries when there was a poor fit. 9. The MFA was an international trade agreement regarding textiles and clothing that was in place from 1974 to 2004. It imposed quotas on the amount of clothing and textile exports from LMICs to highincome countries. 10. This is the type of impact that would have otherwise been associated with the AGOA in traditional empirical frameworks. 11. The synthetic control W*= (w2,,...,wj+1) is selected to minimize X1 − X0 subject to w2 ≥ 0, ..., w j +1 ≥ 0 and w2 + ... + w j +1 = 1, where for any ( k × 1) vector u, u = u 'Vu .
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