Research Information System
3rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COFFEE & COCOA, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, 13 - 15 March 2023, pp.63-70
Coffee, one of the main export products of
Cameroon, is an important agricultural product for the country's economy. The
main objective of this study is to examine Cameroon's coffee export and its
comparative advantage in this area. For this purpose, the commonly used indexes
in comparative advantage analysis such as Balassa index (RCA) and the Vollrath
indexes, which are the Relative Export Advantage (RXA), logarithm of the
Relative Export Advantage (lnRXA) and the Revealed Competitiveness (RC) indexes
are used. In the study, calculations were made for the years 2008-2018 and the
data used in the analysis are obtained from the TRADEMAP database. The results
reveal that the Cameroonian coffee sector has a comparative advantage for each
base year of all indicators taken into account. For the export of Cameroonian
coffee, the average RCA for the period 2008-2018 is 16.61 while the average
values calculated for RXA, lnRXA and RC, also known as Vollrath indexes, are
respectively at the level 17.03, 2.74 and 9.13. Although the results obtained
for each index considered are above the comparative advantage limit values for
all the years examined, a significant decrease is observed in the values of the
index. For example, while the calculated RXA value for 2008 was 32.11, the
calculated value for this index in 2018 is 9.28. Therefore, it is important for
the future of the coffee industry to investigate the reasons for this decline
and to determine and eliminate the factors that negatively affect the
comparative advantage of the coffee product.