Trade and sustainability: Three decades of change across Africa

ABSTRACT Macro-level sustainability indicators have declined for African countries over the last three decades both in absolute terms and relative to non-African countries. Over these same years, trade relations for African exporters have changed significantly in terms of products exported as well as trade partners involved. In this paper, we explore several indicators that may link these changes in trade to the decline in sustainable development across Africa. We create a novel longitudinal dataset that combines specific configurations of products exported to different types of trade partners with country-level sustainability outcomes. We use time series models to identify which of these indicators are significantly associated with sustainability for African countries and compare those to the predominant viewpoints of African development such as the natural resource curse and the call for greater African self-reliance. We find an interesting set of non-results that contradict several common viewpoints, but we find a significant negative association between intra-African supply chain development and lower sustainability. Our results support firm-state development planning by identifying sector-partner configurations linked to sustainability outcomes across Africa as well as future firm-level work to consider how firms headquartered outside of developing countries may address sustainability.