A regional peg through BEAC keeps inflation low but ties Cameroon's hands

Cameroon's monetary policy is not set in Yaoundé but in Yaoundé's regional counterpart: the Bank of Central African States, BEAC, sets a single policy for all six Central African CFA franc zone members, with the currency fixed at 655.957 CFA francs per euro since the franc's 1999 repegging from the French franc. That arrangement has kept Cameroon's inflation consistently lower than most sub-Saharan African peers across the full 1980-2025 period, but it also means Cameroon, as the zone's largest economy and biggest contributor to BEAC's pooled reserves, absorbs regional shocks it does not fully control. Because reserves move with hydrocarbon export revenue across the whole zone, a regional oil-price downturn can squeeze Cameroon's import cover even when its own fiscal position is sound; reserves fell toward roughly two months of import cover at their low point around 2016 before fiscal adjustment across CEMAC restored them to around five months by the early 2020s. With crude output from Cameroon's own maturing fields in gradual decline, the government has leaned on liquefied natural gas and mining to diversify export earnings, but the BEAC peg itself remains the fixed constraint shaping how every oil-price or reserves shock shows up in Cameroon's growth and current-account charts.