Since the onset of the recent global financial crisis and the resulting trade downturn, there have been efforts to\nunderstand the channels through which financial crisis has been affecting global trade and to explain the overall welfare\nimpact of the crisis. Most previous studies focus on finding the key factors that link the financial crisis to the trade\ncrisis. Specifically, the role of limited access to trade credit, murky protectionism, behind-the-border measures, and\nfluctuations in demand components are implicated as the leading contributors to the downturn. The purpose of this study\nis to investigate the significance of two of these factors, namely, murky protectionism and demand components, in the\ncontext of trade among OECD and African countries during the crisis years. Author has drawn commodity-level data\non bilateral trade flow and trade measures from the OECD and GTA databases, respectively, to empirically investigate\nthe impacts of OECD countriesââ?¬â?¢ demand components and murky protectionisms on imports from African countries. The\nresults confirm that OECD countriesââ?¬â?¢ demand components played a relatively lesser role in the downturn of imports from\nAfrican countries, whereas trade measures, especially tariffs, quotas, and the so-called ââ?¬Ë?trade defense measuresââ?¬â?¢ had\nsignificant negative effects on OECD imports from African countries. GTAââ?¬â?¢s evaluation of the trade measures, in terms\nof the nature of their likely impacts on trade flows, is, however, not confirmed in this study
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