Impact of intra-regional trade on economic growth - the case of ECOWAS

Abstract

The study explores the benefits of regional trade to the ECOWAS member countries, proxying economic benefit with the GDP per capita of ECOWAS. The study adopted a descriptive design to analyse the trading performance of the ECOWAS countries, both regionally and with the rest of the world. It also introduced control variables such as inflation, exchange rate, population, and a dummy variable to capture the effect of the economic union sub-group within ECOWAS. The study gathered secondary data from the 15 members of ECOWAS from 2010 to 2022. The data was sorted and tested for completeness and fitness using the STATA application.