The Impact of Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) on the over all export and the textile and appareal products

It has been almost 50 years since some of the early nonreciprocal trade agreements in the form of generalized system of preference (GSP) were initiated by developed countries to the developing world. The main arguments in support of the nonreciprocal trade agreement is that developing countries are facing severe market access problems in advanced countries and hence developed countries are agreed to abolish all the tariff barriers to boost developing countries export. In this paper we are focused in analysing the impact of a special nonreciprocal trade agreement which is the Africa growth and opportunity act (AGOA) granted by U.S to eligible Sub Saharan African countries. The study took both aggregated products and disaggregated products from apparel and textile sector to measure the impact of AGOA on the export performance in the last twenty years for sub-Sahara countries. Our econometric results reveal that, the impact of AGOA on the overall export is insignificant although the impact is Positive. But our disaggregated data have mixed results. From the four product categories, the impact of AGOA is positively promotes the export of knit apparel and woven apparel while it negatively affect export of cotton product and insignificant for other textiles.