Do African Countries Pay More for Imports? Yes

Alexander J Yeats

The World Bank Economic Review, 1990, vol. 4, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: The debt crisis and declining living standards require careful husbanding of critically scarce foreign exchange in most African countries. But economic theory suggests that smaller countries, which import from only a few international suppliers and cannot support competitive markets and infrastructure, would be likely to pay more rather than less for imports. Analysis of import unit values for 1962-87 shows that the twenty African former French colonies paid a price premium of 20-30 percent on average over other importers for iron and steel imports from France. The losses associated with these adverse prices totaled approximately 2 billion dollars by 1987. The study also finds that similar price premia (of 20-30 percent) were paid by former Belgian, British, and Portuguese colonies in Africa for imports of these products from their former rulers. Copyright 1990 by Oxford University Press.

Date: 1990
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