Barthélémy Honfoga , Romain Houssa , Houinsou Dedehouanou and Véronique Thériault (2023), Edited by François Bourguignon , Romain Houssa , Jean-Philippe Platteau & Paul Reding, Cambridge University Press
Abstract
Despite the dominant role it plays in the Beninese economy, the cotton sector has not succeeded in accelerating the country’s economic growth. Yields have been volatile, and production practically stagnated from the mid-1990s to 2016. This poor performance mainly relates to the sector’s unstable management, which has oscillated between public and private monopolies. In its turn, this unstable management relates to several institutional factors including changes in ideology of the donors supporting the sector and the country’s political leader, elite bargaining, and clientelist contracts motivated by rent-seeking. These factors gave way to institutional instability, with the government abruptly overturning policies and planned actions by the previous government or re-assigning the mandates of management organisations in the cotton sector, which caused uncertainty in the sector and increased the cost of agriculture services in the sector.