Comparative Advantage as a Development Model: the Ivory Coast

The Ivory Coast was lauded as a development ‘success’ for 20 years after independence in 1960. In fact, the 1978 World Bank report on the Ivory Coast was sub-titled ‘the challenge of success’. Six years after the publication of this economic study, the so-called ‘miracle’ looked more like a mirage, so much so that an analyst could write: ‘no African country's creditworthiness has fallen more spectacularly than that of the Ivory Coast’. Domestically, it has been obliged to implement a severe austerity programme, and externally, to request a rescheduling of its debt. From a real growth rate of G.N.P. that had averaged more than 7 per cent a year since 1960, growth fell to 2 per cent in 1981, to zero per cent in 1982, and to −4.3 per cent in 1983.