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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Ivory Coast
Index
Crossing the Comoé River
Courtesy Robert Handloff
At independence, Cote d'Ivoire had strong economic and
political ties with France. In contrast with nearly all
other
former French colonies in Africa, the government of Côte
d'Ivoire
continued to cultivate these links into the late 1980s,
some twenty
years after France had suspended tariff preferences for
major
Ivoirian exports. By the 1980s, however, Côte d'Ivoire had
found
supplementary trading partners and sources of foreign
investment,
primarily among France's neighbors in the European
Economic
Community (EEC).
Between 1960 and 1974, the value of Côte d'Ivoire's
exports to
EEC countries more than doubled, while the value of its
exports to
France was halved. Although this trend continued into the
1980s,
French exports to Côte d'Ivoire remained important because
most of
the Ivoirian import substitution industries were either
linked to,
or otherwise dependent on, French parent companies.
In 1986 Côte d'Ivoire's principal markets for exports
were
France and the United States, which together purchased
approximately one-third of its total exports (see
table 6,
Appendix). West Germany was the third largest export
market, having
overtaken Italy in 1985. France, which provided one-third
of Côte
d'Ivoire's imports, was by far the largest supplier. The
United
States and the Netherlands each supplied about 5 percent
of the
country's imports.
After cocoa and coffee, Côte d'Ivoire's principal
exports were
timber and processed wood, cotton and textiles, sugar,
rubber, palm
oil, pineapple, and other agricultural and manufactured
goods. Its
principal imports were manufactured goods, food, petroleum
products, machinery, and transport equipment.
Data as of November 1988
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