International Price Shocks and Technological Changes for Poverty Reduction in Burkina Faso. A General Equilibrium Approach
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After sketching the mutual links between economic growth, agriculture, technology, poverty reduction and external factors; this paper analyses the implications of recent international price shocks on welfare and growth, notably energy and agricultural products, for Burkina Faso, a less industrialised, low-income, food-deficit, net oil-importing country. The socio-economic impacts of the above-mentioned external shocks are analysed by means of a Computable General Equilibrium model (CGE).The pape r also discusses the extent to which technological changes in agriculture, specifically the introduction of “Good Agricultural Practices” (GAP) towards “conservation agriculture”, could mitigate the welfare and growth losses derived by international price shocks. The results of the analysis show that oil price hikes in recent years had much greater impacts on the welfare of the poorer layers of the population than other price shifts, such as international food prices. Additionally, it is shown t hat the technological changes explored in this paper, in spite of their significant impacts on agricultural productivity, by no means countervail the negative welfare and growth losses brought by international price shocks. The energy dependency is a channel that systematically siphons out domestic resources, seriously hampering domestic primary capital accumulation and related endogenous-growth potential. Policy implications for poverty reduction and food security are that in Burkina Faso, ther e is an urgent focus on energy issues by all means, including the adoption of appropriate agricultural technologies. These findings are likely to apply to other less-industrialised energy-importing countries with similar socio-economic structure.