African Trade

The nine contributions in The Trade in Papers Marked with non-Latin Characters initiated by Anne Regourd (ed.) approach Global History through the paper trade. They cover, in addition to a paper used in 14th C Persia, papers used in Africa (Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tunisia) and Asia (the Ottoman Levant, Mecca, Persia, Russia, and Yemen) during the 19th-20th C. Primarily based on paper examination and quantitative data, the book invites us to treat papers as a source, and provides tools to determine the production of manuscripts in space and time for the area of interest. This methodology offers new insights on the competition between suppliers to the various markets particularly in respect of the emergence of import-export trading companies.

Crude oil importation is a major drain on the economy of Ghana, yet no study has attempted to analyse the determinants of crude oil imports. This paper brings to the fore an understanding of the key drivers of crude oil import demand. Using the autoregressive distributed lag modelling framework (ARDL), we estimate variant short-run and long-run import demand models for crude oil using time series data over the period 1980-2012. The results show that demand for crude oil is price inelastic in both the long and short term. Other important drivers of crude oil import are the real effective exchange rate, domestic crude oil production and population growth. Furthermore, real economic activity is found to be the most robust and dominant driver of crude oil demand with mixed estimates of inelastic and elastic coefficients in the short-run and long-run, respectively. Policy implications of our results are discussed.