Côte d’Ivoire

As a top producer and exporter of cocoa beans and one of the top 10 producers and exporters of coffee in the world, Côte d’Ivoire has seen its economic destiny shaped by external and internal factors influencing these two cash crop markets. While rising cocoa and coffee prices underlined its impressive economic performance of the 1970s, their collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted in a reversal of fortune. Economic stagnation led to a permanent political and economic crisis, culminating in the armed conflicts of 2002 and 2010 to 2011. The poverty headcount ratio (at $2 per day) went up to 43.51 percent in 1993, and 49.14 percent in 1998, from 23.9 percent in 1985, only to recover slightly to 46.78 percent in ...