Do African Countries Pay More for Imports? Yes

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
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.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: