Study On African Union's Establishment And Effect

Regional economic integration has become one of the most eye-catching trend in today's world. Recently, it has developed so fast that it has covered most regions in the world. Also it represented itself with different kinds of forms including those of developed countries, those of developed and developing countries and those of developing countries.Africa Union is a new south-south regional economic integration. It is an important move for African people to develop their economy and it has far-reaching influence to other developing countries. Also, Africa has long been an important trading partner to China so studying its situations is meaningful to China. This paper is to research on the establishment of AU and its influence on its member countries.The paper first introduces related theories about regional integration and the history of regional integration in Africa. It introduces AU's establishment and mechanism of operation then compares it to other organizations regional integration. It points out that AU has its opportunities as well as challenges. The paper emphasizes the importance of some polices and plans including MIP and NEPAD, and also checks whether it has fulfilled its economic goals. In the following part, it studies AU's influence on its member countries' economy and trade. Here comes the biggest characteristic:using a great deal of data gathered from WTO database, World Bank and UN Comtrade,together with the panel data model to prove AU's positive influence.When studying AU's influence on the trade, the paper establishes a panel data model by caculating indexes of 20 countries from 2002 to 2008. The result shows that the member countries of AU do not have trade creation but have strong tendency to have trade transfers.At the end of the paper, it studies the influence of AU to China and gives policy suggestions on how China can enlarge the scale of trade with Africa. Key words:regional economic integration; AU; NEPAD; positive influence...