An impact assessment of the SADC FTA on bilateral trade relations between South Africa and Zimbabwe

The Journal paper uses the Gravity Model of International Trade to investigate the impact of the Southern African Development Comuunity (SADC) Free Trade Area (FTA) on trade between South Africa and Zimbabwe. The study found out that South Africa gained more in trade by 88.4% if the country used the SADC FTA than the 1964 Bilateral Trade Agreement which was between South Africa and Zimbabwe. In addition, there was trade diversion of 176% for Zimbabwe when trading in SADC FTA. Furthermore the paper showed that South Africa will in future trade more with countries such as the Seychelles and Angola whilst Zimbabwe will gain more in trade if it trades with  South Africa. The paper recommends that there is need for Zimbabwe and South Africa to expand trade with SADC Countries in order to promote intra-regional trade.

Methods
Data was collected from various websites such as the World Bank World Development Indicators , CEPII and own computations of dummy variables. The data was colllected and arranged in excel documents and stata files.