Research on Sub-Saharan Africa's Unrecorded International Trade: Some Methodological and Conceptual Problems

The New Directions Papers is a new series of the Joint Committee on African Studies (JCAS) of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The purpose of New Directions is to open or re-open a field of African studies which has been neglected or in which not enough new work has been done. Thus, it is intended as a forum for challenging rather than surveying research agendas and received wisdoms that have shaped understandings about Africa. The Committee seeks papers that are empirically-based but methodologically- or theoretically-minded. For example, a case study would be viewed as an opportunity to show how a new perspective on African realities can be achieved through an innovative approach. In general, the Committee favors papers that can help colleagues who work in Africa to renew their practice of the field. The series will appear jointly in the African Studies Review and Cahiers d'etudes africaines, published simultaneously in English and French. This paper is an attempt to describe some of the methodological and conceptual problems in researching aspects of sub-Saharan Africa's international "underground" trade, meaning commercial transactions which are conducted across international frontiers but which are unrecorded in official data. We focus particularly on trade across intercontinental frontiers. Trade may go unrecorded for a great variety of reasons: small-scale operators may believe, rightly or wrongly, that the degree of official contact necessary to record a transaction will involve them in some unwanted expense, in the form of time-consuming paperwork, payment of customs-dues or other taxes and possibly of bribes. The larger-scale operators, enjoying a high degree of political "protection" or even being holders of public office themselves, may enjoy an effective exemption from taxes and other charges in the countries where they are based. Informal economic activity, by its nature, is difficult to detect and to measure, whether in Africa or anywhere else (Tanzi 1982; Alessandrini and Dallago 1987; Thomas 1992). The trade we are