“The purpose of this paper is to give a broad overview of the difficulties SSA’s high
transaction costs present to African exporters. The paper discusses transaction costs and market related problems facing African exporters at all the levels of export trade in the agricultural, horti-cultural and manufacturing subsectors. The idea is to provide a foundation for the country case studies in the collaborative research project on Export Supply Response Constraints conducted by the African Economic Research Consortium(AERC). In terms of the flow of the paper, we first review in
detail production related constraints, other supply related constraints and financial constraints. These are followed by discussions of constraints to facilitation and to distribution channels. Recommendations
for issues and approaches for the project’s country case studies close the presentation.”
