Cameroon has experienced a long and severe period of economic recession from the middle
1980’s to the middle 1990’s. The failure of a decade of real adjustment and deflation
policies (which ended up with the halving of civil servant real wages by the end of 1993)
lead the country to the devaluation of French CFA in January 1994. Since then, Cameroon
has renewed with positive growth at an average annual rate of 3 to 5%.
The main question we address in this paper is how the macroeconomic growth has been
translated to the urban households’ living standards, labour conditions and poverty through
the labour market. For this purpose we will use a set of first hand and original labour force
surveys (LFS) conducted by the Cameroonian National Statistical Office in partnership with
DIAL. As three rounds of LFS are available (1993, 1994 and 2005; with a panel component
between 1993 and 1994), we are able to track changes over time. We investigate both short
term (1994) and long term (2005) devaluation impacts on a large range of labour market
outputs: participation, unemployment and underemployment, sectoral allocation - switch
from non-tradable to tradable sectors -, earning and inequalities, and more broadly the
quality of jobs. One interesting result is that while the informal sector burst out during the
phase of sharp recession, the renewed growth trend after the 1994 CFA Franc devaluation
has provoked a simultaneous light reduction of employment in the informal sector and a
strong growth of informal employment on the whole. What seems to have happened though
is a surge of employees without proper contracts nor social protection in more numerous
registered production units, that is to say a massive formalisation of the informal sector, or
more widely an informalisation of Yaoundé economy.