Like many other African countries in the 1980s, Burkina Faso was urged to engage in a far-reaching liberalization of its state-led cotton sector. Yet unlike most of its neighbors, the Burkinabè government rejected both the status quo and wholesale liberalization, and instead embarked on a more...

The cotton boom in Burkina Faso consisted of a growth in cotton land shares together with an overall increase in total cultivated land. This paper examines the impact of institutional changes in the cotton sector on the evolution of smallholders’ land-use decisions. The empirical analysis is...

This paper explores the case for believing endogenous reforms to be more developmental than externally-imposed reforms, by drawing on the recent unorthodox experience of cotton sector reform in Burkina Faso. We address questions about reform emergence, feasibility, developmental impact, and...

The objective of this report is to identify ways of enhancing competitiveness through sector reforms in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali (the Cotton-4). The report promotes best practices to manage cost and define sales strategies so as to enhance the contribution of the cotton sector to...

Based on comprehensive empirical studies, the paper identifies key reforms and defines strategies to enhance the competitiveness of the cotton sector in West and Central Africa. Lessons learned from the 1990s suggest that transferring public property to private enterprises is not enough, by...