The anglophone crisis cuts deep into regional and national growth

Starting in late 2016, a teachers' and lawyers' strike in Cameroon's English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions escalated into an armed separatist conflict that shows up clearly in the national growth chart even though it was concentrated in only two of ten regions. A World Bank assessment using a computable general equilibrium model estimated that national GDP growth in 2019 would have been 4.5% rather than the 3.8% actually recorded, driven by a 5.3% shortfall in exports, a 3.4% hit to consumption, and a 10.2% drop in investment relative to a no-conflict scenario, while regional GDP in the Northwest and Southwest was an estimated 35.2% and 27% lower, respectively, than it otherwise would have been. The country's largest private-sector employer association estimated cumulative business turnover losses of close to 800 billion CFA francs between 2016 and mid-2019 as firms shut production units, suspended investment, and absorbed higher security costs. Because BEAC's regional monetary stance cannot be tailored to a localized conflict within one member state, the entire adjustment burden from the anglophone crisis fell on fiscal policy and real economic activity rather than on any monetary or exchange-rate response.