Launch of Arii 2019 Website for Deeper Understanding of Africa's Performance in Regional Integration

1 June 2020
Content from a Premium Partner
United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Addis Ababa)

Addis Ababa — Following the release of the African Regional Integration Index (ARII) 2019 Report, ECA launches a dedicated website to enable a deeper understanding of the performance of the continent, Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and African countries in regional integration.

The Index evaluates regional integration on the basis of five dimensions - trade integration, productive integration, macroeconomic integration, infrastructural integration, and integration in terms of free movement of people - for 54 African countries and for the eight RECs recognised by the African Union. ARII 2019 ranks African countries' level of integration within their respective RECs and also with the rest of the continent.

The objective of this dedicated website is to enable in-depth understanding of integration across its various dimensions presented in ARII 2019. The website has features that allow access to customized maps, graphs, tables and the underlying raw data.

Africa's overall score in regional integration from ARII 2019 is relatively low, suggesting considerable room for improvement. However, if we look closely into the scores across the five integration dimensions, it becomes apparent that Africa's relative poor performance is due to the low scores in two specific areas: productive integration and infrastructural integration. If we go another layer deeper and look at the scores of indicators within dimensions, low trade in intermediate products tends to explain the relatively weak performance in productive integration, while inadequate infrastructure networks drive poor performance in infrastructural integration.

The five dimensions of integration in ARII 2019 are so closely interrelated that Africa's overall performance would improve significantly if regional value chains are strengthened, thereby improving the continent's productive integration, and the infrastructure network is enhanced.

ECA has provided training to Member States on the collection and use of the information contained in ARII 2019 for policy analysis and policy development.

The dedicated website can be accessed here. For any additional information or feedback on ARII 2019 and/or the website, please send an email to eca-atpc@un.org.

Read the original article on UNECA.

Tagged:
Copyright © 2020 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.

AllAfrica publishes around 500 reports a day from more than 100 news organizations and over 500 other institutions and individuals, representing a diversity of positions on every topic. We publish news and views ranging from vigorous opponents of governments to government publications and spokespersons. Publishers named above each report are responsible for their own content, which AllAfrica does not have the legal right to edit or correct.

Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica. To address comments or complaints, please Contact us.