Expanding Trade Across The Maghreb
IMF Blog, April 23, 2019
Source details
- Canonical URL
- Expanding Trade Across The Maghreb
Other formats
Bibliographic details
- Authors: Ramzy Al Amine, JeanFranois Dauphin, Alexei Kireyev
- Published: April 23, 2019
Background
- In 1989, the five Maghreb countries—Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia—established the Arab Maghreb Union to promote cooperation and economic integration.
- Thirty years later, there is still a largely untapped potential for regional trade among Maghreb countries.
- The issue is highlighted as important because all Maghreb countries need to create jobs for their young and growing populations.
Current trade patterns
- Existing intra-Maghreb trade is limited and concentrated in a few goods:
- Fuels and mineral oils exported from Algeria to Tunisia and Morocco.
- Vegetable oils, machinery, iron and steel exported by Tunisia to Algeria and Libya.
- Iron, steel, apparel and clothing, vehicles and electric equipment exported by Morocco to Algeria, Tunisia, and Mauritania.
Opportunities for expanded trade
- The authors’ calculations identify many opportunities for further trade, including:
- Transport services, food, metals and chemicals from Morocco to Tunisia.
- Minerals from Morocco to Algeria.
- Different types of fuels traded in reverse between countries.
- Tunisia exporting vegetables to Morocco and minerals to Algeria.
Potential benefits and projections
- Greater openness to intra-regional trade in goods and services would:
- Create a large market attractive to investors.
- Help build regional value-chains and link them to global value-chains.
- Increase resilience to economic shocks.
- Provide opportunities for nearly 100 million people.
- The IMF paper estimates that growth in Maghreb countries could increase by one percentage point in the long term as a result of deeper economic integration.
Pathways to integration and policy considerations
- Participants at the IMF-World Bank 2019 Spring Meetings discussed approaches to achieve deeper integration:
- Integration could be achieved gradually by weaving together links in sectors and among countries as conditions allow.
- Times of economic crisis or political transition may provide opportunities for faster integration.
- New technologies were seen as potentially powerful accelerators of economic integration, since technology knows no borders.
Expanding Trade Across The Maghreb — Ramzy Al Amine, Jean-François Dauphin, Alexei Kireyev, April 23, 2019.
