Paper short abstract:

Comparing the Ghanaian and Kenyan Cashew sectors, this paper tests the hypothesis that the electoral weight of raw commodity sectors influences whether governments tax or prohibit their respective exports for the benefit of commodity processors.

Paper long abstract:

Primary commodity processing is arguably the most promising route for African economies to rekindle their economic transformation. Export taxation and prohibitions on unprocessed commodities are currently among the most-employed policy instrument to promote it. Importantly, however, the employment of such export restrictions varies significantly across the developing world. Many extractive commodities, metal waste and scrap, timber as well as raw hides and skins exports are being restricted very commonly and heavily. Most agricultural good exports, however, are barely restricted at all nowadays. While different economic and political science scholarships and models struggle to recognize and explain this pattern, I test the argument that depending on their capacity to bring large numbers of the population to vote in their economic interest, certain commodity producing sectors can constitute a significant threat to governments' political survival. While all producing sectors oppose export taxes and other restrictions as they redistribute income from producers to processors, only those producing sectors with a high "electoral weight" - such as most agricultural sectors - will have enough political leverage to avoid high taxation and severe restrictions. Mixed methods - consisting of large-N descriptive statistics from the novel "African Export Restrictions Database" and in-depth comparative case studies of the cashew sectors in Ghana and Kenya - are employed to test this argument against competing explanations.