Public policy in Cameroon

The economic crisis of the 1990s completely transformed Cameroon’s economic policy framework (Mbu 2014). Marked by the deterioration in trade, this crisis highlighted the active role of the international policy actors, mainly the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), within the design of a rent economy for the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) (Noorbakhsh and Paloni 2001; Harrison 2004). These programs sought to privatize, deregulate and reduce trade barriers so that the government could achieve macro stability and introduce markets and market prices as an essential prerequisite for sustained economic growth. Cameroon, like many African economies, undertook significant fiscal and monetary reforms during this period. Before and in the years of independence, the economies of African countries were oriented towards the commercialization of raw commodities, with the structure of production, institutions, infrastructure and logistics systems all focused on exports. Therefore, policy experiences in Cameroon were hardly unique from failures, including attendant developmental trends that followed the disastrous implementation of SAPs in Africa from the 1980s.

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Published in: Routledge Handbook of Public Policy in Africa
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003143840-36