Cote d'Ivoire was considered as an island of stability and economic prosperity in a region of stagnation, and political turmoil. The situation was reversed in the early 2000, when a decade of instability led to a surge in crime and violence. Yet, very little was known about the economic consequences of crime at the firm level. This paper tested empirically the impact of crime on business activity in Cote d'Ivoire. Using a recent World Bank enterprise survey dataset and a Heckman two-step procedure we showed that crime and private provision of security negatively impacted firms' profit and investment.

The lack of health insurance for smallholder farmers in most sub‐Saharan African countries hurts the families and can also negatively affect agriculture production, exports, and tax revenues. This paper analyzes the linkage between medical emergencies and agriculture exports and the corresponding tax revenues for smallholder farmers in Côte d'Ivoire. It uses two complementary datasets: the 2016 Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) smallholder survey and the 2015 Côte d'Ivoire living standard survey. The paper finds that a medical emergency is negatively and significantly associated with a decrease in the likelihood that a smallholder farmer cultivates cocoa of 3.9 percentage points, driving them into poverty and reducing productivity at the lower quantiles. The paper then estimates that medical emergencies can be correlated with the decline in cocoa exports of $853 million and in tax revenues of $125 million, representing 0.2% of the Ivorian gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017.

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