# II. TAXONOMY OF THE PRIVAATE SECTOR'

The non-farming Private sector in Cote d'Ivoire consists of: about 800 "large" enterprises (with at least .50 employees); several thousand "medium" enterprises (with between 10 and 50 employees); many thousands of Ismall" enterprises (with up to 10 employees); and several hundred thousand microentrepreneurs (mostly just generating self-employment). Total employment in the private enterprise sector is roughly divided as follows: large 10o, medium and small 15%, and micro 75%7 This "pyramid" of enterprise types has at its top twenty very large public enterprises employing an average of 1,400 people each. The pyram-id is also quite rugged -- with a very marked shortage of small and medium enterprises poised for growth.

Essentially all large enterprises and a small group of medium enterprises appear to rcceive the bulk of the benefits of "formality" (bank financing, investmen't incentives, etc.) and, in exchange, face the greatest rigidities and collect the bulk of the indirect taxes. A very large proportion of the "medium" size enterprises are not in manufacturing and would seem to be very vulnerable to the adjustment Cote d'Ivoire's economy is, belatedly, undergoing. These enterprises represent the lower end of the scale of an artificially modem (i.e. uncompetitive) sector and have been the first to suffer the impact of the current crisis. Because many of these are owned and run by expatriates they are also less resilient. Meanwhile, the indigenous entrepreneurs (other than the privileged larger ones) have found it extremely difficul **t** o obtain the resources to grow from a very small size -- stunted by a regulatory and financial system that has been private sector oriented only in a very narrow, largebiased sense.

Large private enterprises employ an average of 145 people each and represent a varied group including subsidiaries of multinational corporations, joint private-public ventures (with state minority shareholding), enterprises owned by Ivoirian nationals, and those owned by other nationals (mostly French and Lebanese). The nationality mix of the owners and managers of these large private enterprises is reflected in the fact that nearly one-fifth of payroll expenditure in 1988 was for

**6** The classification of enterprises by size follows the practice of the Ivorian Ministry of Industry, which incorporates a relatively low threshold for classifying enterprises as "large": 50 or more employees. The information on which the analysis in this section is based comes from the following sources: 'Banque des Donnees Financi&es" (1988); SME Survey by Centre Gama (1989); Informal Sector Survey by Centre Gama (1988); and by the survey and interviews conducted by the June 1990 CECPS mission. Our access to microentrepreneurs in Bouake was greatly facilitated by M. Maurice Djan of OIC International.

7 These figures are rough, illustrative estimates based on a variety of sources. Data for the nearly 800 large private enterprises show total employment of about 120,000. Medium and small enterprise employment is estimated - with a wide margin of error - to approach 200,000. According to A. Tour6, an authoritative observer of the informal sector, there are over one million people working in Cote d'Ivoire's urban informal sector. His definition ("petit metiers") is broader than that of microenterprises employed here (activities involving some specialization and continuity).

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