Africa Economics: research and analysis

Publications

• 2026 · Free

  Between October 2023 and December 2024, the world price of cocoa rose three and a half fold, reaching a record $12,565 per tonne. On 1 September 2026, with the London contract more than double its March low, Côte d’Ivoire confirmed a farmgate price 57 per cent below the previous main crop. This paper explains why and shows that the standard measure of the share captured by cocoa farmers measures the wrong thing. Administered origins do not promise farmers a share of the current market price, but a share of the price at which a public body sold the crop forward months before harvest. The paper derives an exact identity linking the two and decomposes the variance of the observed share across fourteen Ivorian crop seasons. World-price drift accounts for more than the entire variance, while the policy share accounts for less than half. Identification comes from within Côte d’Ivoire, which used negotiated pricing from 1999 to 2011 and an administered guarantee from 2012. Under liberalisation, farmers’ shares remained broadly stable whether world prices were falling or rising; under administered pricing, the share fell from 66 to 47 per cent. Administered pricing shifts farmers’ income out of booms and into downturns rather than substantially increasing their average share, while farmers involuntarily bear the resulting position. Ghana exhibits the same pattern more sharply. Neither pricing regime resolves cocoa poverty: at the average yield of 350 kilograms per hectare achieved by West African households, the price required for a living income exceeded the annual mean world price in twenty-four of the twenty-seven cocoa years studied.

• 2026 · Free

  On 28 February 2026, the Strait of Hormuz closed. Using daily satellite observations of the global fleet, this paper estimates the resulting effects on maritime trade and examines their implications for Africa. Transits through Hormuz fell by 93% relative to a seasonally adjusted counterfactual, representing the largest disruption recorded at any major maritime chokepoint during the seven years for which comparable data are available. Seaborne trade across the seven economies with ports inside the Persian Gulf declined by approximately four fifths. The findings show that Hormuz differs fundamentally from bypassable chokepoints such as Suez, Panama and Bab el-Mandeb. When Hormuz closes, ports inside the Gulf have no alternative maritime route; trade is therefore interrupted rather than rerouted. Across 146 economies, the response to exposure follows a threshold rather than a gradual relationship. At the port level, median activity fell by 71% inside the Gulf but increased by 2% outside it. Oman, whose principal ports lie outside the strait, lost only 6%, compared with losses of around 80% among several neighbouring Gulf economies. Outside the Gulf, maritime-volume effects were heterogeneous and generally limited. Africa and the Americas recorded relative increases, Asia remained broadly unchanged, and Europe and Oceania declined. These volume effects, however, conceal the incidence of the oil-price shock. Applying the observed oil-price increase to pre-war net fuel trade indicates a large transfer away from Asia and Europe and towards fuel-exporting economies. For Africa, the principal transmission mechanism was therefore not maritime disruption but energy prices. No significant decline in African seaborne volume or traffic at major corridor gateways is detected. Nevertheless, the price shock divided the continent: nine economies gained and twenty-six lost. Estimated effects range from a gain equivalent to 11% of GDP for Libya to a loss of 3% for Mauritania. Under a scenario in which the disruption persists through 2027, the annual loss for the most exposed African economy could reach 11% of GDP. These estimates represent gross exposure at constant quantities, not welfare effects.