The Burkinabè Cotton Story 1992–2007: Sustainable Success or Sub-Saharan Mirage?

Like many other African countries in the early 1990s, Burkina Faso was urged to engage in a far-reaching liberalization of its state-led cotton sector. Instead it engaged in more gradual and sequenced reforms characterized by institutional innovations and partial privatization. But while the reforms...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inWorld development Vol. 39; no. 8; pp. 1460 - 1475
Main Authors Kaminski, Jonathan, Headey, Derek, Bernard, Tanguy
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2011
Elsevier
Pergamon Press Inc
SeriesWorld Development
Subjects
Accounting
Africa
Agricultural policy
Agricultural prices
Agriculture
Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso cotton poverty reduction counterfactual analysis production growth political sustainability
Cote d'Ivoire
Cotton
Cotton industry
counterfactual analysis
Economic conditions
Economic Development
Economic policy
Economic reform
Economics
Farmers
Innovations
Institutional reform
Liberalization
political sustainability
Poverty alleviation
poverty reduction
Prices
Privatization
Production
production growth
Reform
Reforms
Return Migration
Studies
Success
Sustainability
Sustainable development
Burkina Faso
Ivory Coast
Cote d'Ivoire
cotton
Burkina Faso
production growth
political sustainability
poverty reduction
counterfactual analysis
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Summary:Like many other African countries in the early 1990s, Burkina Faso was urged to engage in a far-reaching liberalization of its state-led cotton sector. Instead it engaged in more gradual and sequenced reforms characterized by institutional innovations and partial privatization. But while the reforms coincided with a threefold increase in cotton exports in the space of a decade, there is heated debate about whether the reforms truly induced sustainable growth. In addition to reviewing existing evidence, this paper develops a counterfactual analysis to more rigorously assess the reform’s impacts after accounting for the confounding influence of exogenous shocks and centrally administered farmgate prices. The paper shows that while many elements of the reform process did achieve important economic objectives, return migration from Côte d’Ivoire explains around a third of production growth, financial elements of the reforms were not fully sustainable, and institutional arrangements failed to fully empower cotton farmers.
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ISSN:0305-750X
1873-5991
DOI:10.1016/j.worlddev.2010.12.003