Commercial Policy and the Incidence of Protection in the Ivory Coast

All developing countries are open economies, in the sense of being integrated in the world economy. With one possible exception, Hong Kong, all developing countries make some use of commercial policy interventions to alter relative prices within the traded goods sector (for instance as between importables and exportables), or between the traded and non-traded goods sectors. Since independence in 1960 the Ivory Coast has made use of a wide range of commercial policy interventions. This case study is concerned with an approach to the evaluation of protection which has recently evolved, namely incidence analysis, in the context of the Ivory Coast. The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 provides some background information on the economy of the Ivory Coast. Section 3 briefly comments on economic aspects of commercial policy in developing countries. This provides a context for the discussion of the incidence model which takes place in section 4. Section 5 reports the results of estimating the incidence model, and section 6 offers some concluding comments.