Since the early 2000s, the totality of African countries has increasingly reverted to high export taxes and bans on raw commodities to promote processing industries. By increasing the local supply of commodities, these trade and industrial policy tools decrease the local price of the goods, implying a distribution of income from producers to processors. While this renders domestic processors more competitive, it can seriously reduce producers' income.
Notably, however, the employment of heavy export taxes and bans varies significantly across commodity sectors within the same country, as well as between the same commodity sectors across countries. Several theories and arguments in the economics, international political economy (IPE), and domestic politics literature might explain why governments severely tax and ban certain commodity exports but not others. From an economic viewpoint, the processing of certain commodities might be uneconomical, or severely restricting the export of certain commodities might be perceived as too risky, as it might kill of the goose that lays the golden eggs. IPE explanations would likely highlight the influence of international trade agreements or donor interests as shaping the space to which commodities governments can employ such export measures. Within approaches focusing on domestic politics, endogenous trade interest group models (such as the Protection for Sale model) would hypothesize that governments will deviate from aggregate welfare maximizing free trade by restricting certain commodity exports only when paid more by organized rent-seeking processor interest groups than the less organized producers can offer. More institutionalist approaches would arguably add that particularly the presence of democracy is likely to empower more populous interest groups and protect them from adverse policies, whereby related factors as (sub-national) electoral competitiveness or electoral cycles could be influencing this effect. Finally, clientelistc approaches see trade restrictions as creations by rent-seeking patron-politicians of artificial barriers that businesses must pay bribes to circumvent.
Based on a critical discussion of these approaches, this paper makes the argument that due to a perceived or actual increased risk to their political survival, policy makers are less likely to severely tax or ban the export of commodities, the larger the share of the population that gains significant income from working in producing that commodity. It tests this against competing arguments by first crudely comparing export measures across African cashew producers and then in more depth comparing the case of the failed 2016 raw cashew nut ban in Ghana with the successful 2009 raw cashew and macadamia nut ban in Kenya. It finds compelling evidence for the proposed argument and demonstrate that in African democracies the increased political threat of large producer groups appears to be particularly channeled through their electoral weight.