The Study examined the impact of trade policies on manufacturing export performance of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region. The motivation for this study is the fact that despite the strong wave of liberalization reform across the globe, the SSA region yet remained small player in the world trade. Thus, the report of United Nations conference on trade and development(UNCTAD),2003 revealed that the share of trade performance and manufacturing exports in the Africa continent’s total merchandize export was around thirty percent in year 2000.That is, the share had increased only by ten(10) percent compared to 1980 shares. In order to understand the performance of manufacturing exports before and after the introduction of trade liberalization policy, this study explored static panel estimators namely, fixed effect and random effect models to examine the impact of trade policies on manufacturing export performance of countries in SSA. Empirically, the result revealed evidence of negative relationship between tariff rates and manufacturing exports thus confirming the assertion that trade protection measures are still very much favoured in some SSA countries. On the other hand however, our findings of positive and significant relationship between manufacturing exports and trade liberalization support the view that openness of trade via trade liberalization is effective for stimulating manufacturing export performance.
Keywords: Trade Policy; Manufacturing Export; Panel Model; SSA
