Some Space for Success: Egypt as Part of an Eastern and Southern African Regional Trade Agreement

It is of Egypt's interest, as a member of the Common Market for East and South Africa (COMESA), to fully implement the agreement, in coordination with the rest of the member countries. This paper attempts to detect the gap between the implementation plans and the actual implementation of COMESA from an Egyptian perspective, and to assess the impact of the institutional factors on the potential implementation of the agreement. The paper relies on a gravity model, where the institutional factors are the independent variables and the trade flows between the member countries -as proxies for the potential implementation of COMESA- are the dependent variables.