Assessment of the influencing factors on African countries signing Economic Partnership Agreements with EU

This paper want to figure out factors influencing the signing of EPA agreements by African countries and three sets of variables are used : economic, political and regional integration, which include eight variablesin total(GDP、LDC、Resource、Trade with EU、Governance、Democratic、Number、RIL) . Data related with variables are derived from the European Commission's website on the signing of EPAs between African countries and the EU; The economic scale and resource endowment of African countries come from the World Bank's World Development Index (WDI) database; Trade data from the International Trade Centre (ITC) Trade map; The Corruption Perceptions Index (GCI) comes from the Global Perceptions Index report published annually by Transparency International, which used a 10-point scale before 2012, multiplied by 10 to convert into a 10-point scale, which is consistent with the index after 2012; Degree of democracy comes from data provided by the Polity IV Project website; The number of FTAs signed by Africa comes from the regional trade agreement database on the World Trade Organization website. The study period is 2007~2020, during which major African countries have basically completed the signing or ratification procedures of EPAs.