Panel Data Analysis of International Trade in West African Sub Region

West African countries have suffered so much under poor economic growth rate; this issue is largely caused as a result of the poor performance in international trade, which is one of the most essential tools for economic growth. The study investigated the factors influencing international trade in West African Sub region. A Pooled OLS, Fixed Effect Model, and Random Effect Model were adopted to fit the panel regression model for the panel data sets. The study divided the models into three in other to have proper view of factors influencing international trade across West African Sub-region, each model contain the same independent variables and different dependent variables. The result shows that fixed effect model was accurate for the study. Also from the study it was observed that for the first model which use import as dependent variable, gross domestic production, foreign direct investment, and exchange rate are positively significant to import which implies that all the regressor variable influence import across west African sub region positively, while only GDP and FDI are positively significant to export and only FDI is positively significant to trade balance (TB). We therefore conclude that foreign direct investment is the key macro-economic variable that positively influences the policy of international trade across West African over the period of consideration.