On overall regional integration, COMESA’s average is low. Its top performer scores moderately. COMESA’s best performance is in trade integration and it could improve most in productive integration. This said, with one exception, no COMESA member achieves more than a moderately high score on trade, productive, macroeconomic or infrastructural integration.
Zambia is the outlier: its near-perfect score on trade integration reflects its best share of trade and exports in the region. Zambia also scores highly on productive integration.
COMESA’s other high performers include Comoros, Djibouti, and Somalia, which achieve a perfect score on the free movement of people dimension. This score pulls their overall rankings to the above-average zone. On the other dimensions of regional integration, however, the highest score among these three is below the mid-point. It is achieved by Djibouti in trade.
ARII measures regional integration in COMESA along five dimensions. These dimensions use sixteen indicators to determine the extent to which COMESA members are integrated within their region.
The more outward a dimension stretches, the more integrated COMESA is on that dimension. Scores are calculated on a scale of 0 (not at all integrated) to 1 (entirely integrated).
This chart shows how each country in COMESA performs on the five dimensions of regional integration. Click the inner segments of the bars to see each country’s score.