Abstract Most regional trade agreements ascribe great importance to member country’s political regimes of which preference is given to democratisation. In this paper, we investigate the influence of political regimes on bilateral trade in West Africa. We exploit two different ratings for political regime: Freedom House and Polity IV and applied Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood estimation technique. The empirical results reveal that political regime is significant to trade determination. Result portrays that generally; democratic regime positively and significantly influences bilateral trade and is homogenous in export and import. In West Africa, being import dependent, such influence is only robust as importer. We further noted that the influence of political regime on bilateral trade depends on the region and level of income; favourable to high-income Western countries. The results further indicate that two countries of similar political regimes trade less which is consistent in West African region.

中文翻译：

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政治体制会影响西非的双边贸易吗？

摘要大多数区域贸易协定都将成员国的政治制度视为民主化的重要内容。在本文中，我们调查了政治制度对西非双边贸易的影响。我们利用两种不同的政治制度评级：自由之家和政治四号，并应用泊松伪最大似然估计技术。实证结果表明，政治体制对贸易确定具有重要意义。结果描述一般；民主政体对双边贸易产生积极和重大影响，并且在进出口方面是同质的。在西非，由于依赖进口，这种影响只像进口商一样强大。我们进一步指出，政治制度对双边贸易的影响取决于地区和收入水平；对高收入的西方国家有利。结果还表明，政治体制相似的两个国家的贸易较少，这在西非地区是一致的。