Distortions to agricultural incentives in Cameroon : Main report
Cameroon is among the more prosperous countries in Africa, thanks to relatively abundant agricultural land and offshore petroleum. These spurred an economic boom from unification of the country in 1972 until 1986, which was followed by a decade of decl...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper (Numbered Series) |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/660761468336081857/Main-report http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37343 |
| Summary: | Cameroon is among the more prosperous
countries in Africa, thanks to relatively abundant
agricultural land and offshore petroleum. These spurred an
economic boom from unification of the country in 1972 until
1986, which was followed by a decade of decline from 1986 to
1995 and a limited recovery since then. Prior to the
economic crisis of the late 1980s, Cameroon's
development strategy efforts were managed through a series
of five-year development plans. In these, agriculture was
described as the priority sector and the government
intervened massively in rural development, both directly
through the establishment of state-owned agro-industries,
rural corporations and settlements, and also indirectly
through various support programs. Later reforms and the
devaluation of 1994 improved performance through allowing
more market incentives to play a role. In this chapter the
authors use the methodology of Anderson et al. (2008) to
quantify the evolution of those distortions to farmer
incentives, measuring the incidence of government policy on
producers and consumers each year in Cameroon from 1961 to
2004. For each of the major activities we compute Nominal
Rates of Assistance (NRAs), which are then aggregated into a
variety of other indexes. The chapter is organized as
follows. The next section provides a brief overview of
agriculture's role in the economy. A summary of the
main agricultural policy incentives, interventions and
reforms is then provided, before describing the
country's growth performance over time. The main
section computes and analyzes government distortions to
agricultural incentives, and the concluding section
speculates on prospects for future policy reform. |
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