Côte d'Ivoire entered, at the beginning of 1993, a pivotal period with heavy economic liabilities. After the brutal slowdown of the 1980s, the Ivorian economy posted a GDP of 2,681.5 billion CFA francs, or approximately 60% of the GDP of the entire West African franc zone, but suffered from a stubborn recession since 1986. The country then carried a public external debt of nearly 1,100 billion CFA francs at the end of 1993, or more than 60% of the GDP, rendering many industrial companies bloodless, unable to honor their obligations. The industrial sector is marked by four structural ills identified since the adjustment plans. Namely insufficient competitiveness, discrimination of the incentive system against exporters, weak integration of the local productive fabric, and glaring gaps in support for SMEs. Thus, the Ivorian industry, built since the 1970s on a logic of import-substitution oriented towards a continuously expanding domestic market, now finds itself caught between sagging local demand and merciless international competition.

The salutary shock of the 1994 devaluation

The decisive turning point of this period occurred on January 12, 1994, when the CFA franc was devalued by 50% against the French franc. For Ivorian industry, this electroshock produces contradictory but generally stimulating effects. Exports immediately regain their competitiveness on international markets, while imports rise in price, automatically creating de facto protection for local production. The trade balance, structurally in surplus, saw its balance rebound spectacularly. In 1995, exports reached 1,985 billion CFA francs for 1,162 billion CFA francs, representing a trade surplus of 823 billion CFA francs. The processing industry benefits directly from this new situation. The wood sector clearly illustrates this shift. Faced with precarious international competitiveness, a m³ of Ivorian wood then cost 120 dollars compared to 20 dollars in Asia, the country chose to favor local processing, so much so that around sixty factories now employ 15,000 people and achieve a turnover of 100 billion CFA francs. Cocoa and coffee, star products of the national economy, now represent only 30% of total exports, a sign of real industrial diversification, even if still fragile. Côte d'Ivoire is resolutely committed to a policy of privatization under pressure from the Bretton Woods institutions. Officially launched in 1990, this program was initially held back until 1993 by the reluctance of Ivorian parliamentarians and civil servants (only 5 companies out of the sixty announced had been privatized at that date). From 1993, the dynamic accelerated with the privatization of around ten mixed economy companies in the hydrocarbons, agro-food and various industries sectors. By 1996, out of 65 companies registered in the privatization program, 25 had actually been sold to the private sector. Electricity, privatized in 1990-1991 for the benefit of the French group Bouygues-Saur, had opened the way. The liberalization policy is then based on three pillars clearly defined by Prime Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan: economic liberalism, deregulation of prices and foreign trade, and legal codification to attract investors. This strategy is bearing fruit, reflected in foreign investments increasing from 30 billion CFA francs in 1994 to 200 billion CFA francs in 1995, with the arrival of players from Latin America and Asia.

The 1984 investment code and its lasting effects

Although promulgated a decade earlier, the investment code of November 1984 continued to produce its structuring effects throughout the 1993-1999 period. This text divided the territory into three industrial zones (South, Center and North) to encourage the deconcentration of industries outside Abidjan. Concretely, between 1984 and 1995, this system allowed the granting of 293 approvals to companies, compared to 221 under the old code of 1959, facilitating the creation of more than 148 new industrial companies and the restructuring of 113 entities in difficulty. The industrial restructuring policies covering the period 1980-1994 had the explicit ambition of safeguarding Ivory Coast's industrial assets from collapse. After the devaluation of 1994 and the gradual recovery of public finances, the Ivorian economy entered what analysts from the French Senate described in 1996 as a period of “economic renewal”. The growth rate, which had reached 1.2% in 1994, approached 6% in 1996, and Prime Minister Duncan harbored the ambition of a double-digit rate in 1998, wanting to make Côte d'Ivoire one of the "economic elephants" of Africa like the Asian dragons.

Shadows on the industrial dashboard

Despite these encouraging signals, Ivorian industry entered the end of the 1990s with serious vulnerabilities. Public external debt, estimated at 5,739 billion CFA francs in 1994, represents more than 200% of GDP and 540% of the total value of exports, absorbing a considerable part of the trade surpluses which could have been re-injected into productive investment. Côte d'Ivoire is then among the most indebted countries in the world per capita, a burden which is stifling the private sector and damaging the cash flow of industrial companies in a cascade. Structurally, dependence on agricultural raw materials remains a fundamental weakness. As noted by Laurent Gbagbo, then leader of the opposition, Ivorian growth remains prisoner of the world prices of raw materials, too little processed locally for their added value to fully benefit the national economy. The 1994-1998 period, later described by Ivorian researchers as a phase of industrial “recovery and consolidation”, in reality ended with an industrial fabric still vulnerable, before the socio-political crisis of the end of the 1990s once again weakened the achievements.

In short, the period 1993-1999 reveals the deep ambivalence of the Ivorian industrial model, capable of remarkable resilience when macroeconomic conditions improve (as after the devaluation of 1994), it remains structurally dependent on external signals, whether raw material prices, monetary parity or the injunctions of international donors. Privatizations and the influx of foreign investments have certainly modernized certain sections of the industrial fabric, but without managing to break with the logic of extroverted industrialization, poorly integrated and weakly generating local added value.