ABSTRACT
Trade remains crucial to Africa’s political economies even if the continent as a whole is increasingly marginal in global trade. For, while over the last quarter-century Africa has come to constitute a declining share of global exchange, in both services and products, both intra-and intercontinental, many companies and communities depend on it for any prospects of development, sustainable or not. Moreover, its proportion of world trade is probably considerably under-recorded, in part because of regional exchange and in part because of related informal trade, both legal and otherwise.
