Souleymane Soumahoro was an IDRC research fellow at the Center for Global Development. His research agenda was on the political economy of development, international trade, and governance, and its implications for shared prosperity and poverty reduction. Souleymane holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Oklahoma and a master’s degree in International Economics from the University of Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand I. While pursuing graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma, Souleymane served as instructor and teaching assistant for various undergraduate economics courses. He also worked as a research assistant at the headquarters of the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) in Dakar Senegal.
In a recent paper, Souleymane exploited the de facto partition of Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cocoa producer, between 2002 and 2011 to examine the causal effects of export tax reduction on cocoa farming households’ living standards. His findings suggest that exposure to low export taxes is likely to be welfare-enhancing for local cocoa producers.