This study investigates the contribution of public investment to economic growth in Cameroon from 1977 to 2015. It uses the Autoregressive Distributed Lag cointegration (ARDL) approach to estimate a modified version of the production function. The estimates indicate that real gross domestic product, labor force, public investment and private investment are cointegrated. Also based on the estimates, public and private investments have positive and significant effects on real gross domestic product in both the short-run and the long-run. The estimates further show that labor force has a significant long-run relationship with real gross domestic product but found no evidence of a significant short-run relationship. The error correction term is negative and significant suggesting that any deviations of real GDP growth from the long-term value would be corrected subsequently.

Background The bulk of health care financing in Cameroon is derived from out-of-pocket payments. Given that poverty is pervasive, with a third of the population living below the poverty line, health care financing from out-of-pocket payments is likely to have redistributive and equity effects. In addition, out-of-pocket payments on health care can limit the ability of households to afford non-healthcare goods and services. Method The study estimates the Kakwani index for analyzing tax progressivity and applies the model developed by Aronson, Johnson, and Lambert (1994) to measure the redistributive effects of health care financing using data from the 2014 Cameroon Household Survey. The estimated indexes measure the extent of the progressivity of health care payments and the reranking that results from the payments. Results The results indicate that out-of-pocket payments for health care in Cameroon in 2014 represented a significant share of household prepayment income. The results also show some evidence of inequity as few people change ranks after payment despite the slight progressivity of health care out-of-pocket payments. Conclusion The existence of some disparities among income groups implies that the burdens of ill-health and out-of-pocket payments are unequal. The detected disparities within income groups can be reduced by targeting low-income groups through increases in government expenditures on health care and pro-poor prioritization of the expenditures.

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This chapter presents an overview of the small and medium enterprises sector as well as the banking sector in Cameroon. Data from various sources show that the banking sector is highly concentrated and the majority of the interests are foreign. The banking sector serves about 15 percent of the population. The chapter further uses firm-level data from the 2016 World Bank Enterprise Survey on the characteristics of SMEs in Cameroon for some estimations to determine the effect of the characteristics of the firm on SMEs’ access to working capital in banks. The results show that the size of the firm, its legal status, and some foreign activities could improve access to bank finance for SMEs. A second regression to determine firm characteristics that affect access to investments revealed that firm size and legal status were the only statistically significant variables. Given that access to funding is significantly related to the size of the firm, medium to large firms have a clear advantage relative to smaller firms in obtaining the bank financing for both working capital and investment. SMEs in Cameroon will benefit from more opportunities to build relationships with the banks. The banks could carry out intentional outreach to SMEs for less formal activities and the government promotion apparatus could leverage their resources by adding connecting SMEs to the private sector banks since their presence is limited to a few cities.