The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Exports in Africa: An Approach Based on Fractional Integration

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on exports in Africa. Fractional integration methods were applied to monthly African exports from 26 African countries from January 2011 to December 2020. We observe that the order of integration is found to be statistically smaller than 1 in all except a single country, Angola. For the rest of the African countries, shocks are transitory, showing mean reversion though with a large degree of heterogeneity across the countries, ranging from low levels of persistence with short memory behaviour in Sao Tome and Principle, the Seychelles and Kenya to high levels of persistence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.