How does Burkina Faso’s trade profile look? Level of exports and imports over thirty years, structural composition, partner concentration, and the position on the economic-complexity frontier.
exports 2024$9.5B
imports 2024$6.5B
balance$2.9B
eci rank#197 / 226
products exported1,573
Figure 1
Burkina Faso: merchandise exports and imports, 1995-2024
Exports grew from $276.1M in 1995 to $9.5B in 2024, a CAGR of 13.0%. The merchandise balance sits at $2.9B, which is 31% of exports , a simple scale normalisation over the available BACI series. Note that exports are f.o.b. and imports c.i.f., so a meaningful portion of the gap reflects freight and insurance baked into the import valuation rather than a real shortfall in receipts (CIF/FOB spreads typically run 5-10% per UNCTAD/IMF BOP methodology, but country-specific values vary). The more conventional open-economy metric is the current- account balance as % of GDP, reported on the /macro/BFA page.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), f.o.b. exports and c.i.f. imports, summed across all reporters.Figure 1b
The structural change in what a country exports, from agriculture to manufactures to services, or between HS sections, is one of the most studied transitions in development economics (Imbs & Wacziarg 2003; Hausmann, Hwang & Rodrik 2007). The chart below shows the five largest HS sections of Burkina Faso’s exports in 2024, plotted back thirty years.
Figure 2
Top-5 HS sections of exports, 1995-2024
Figure 2b
Export basket by HS chapter, 2024 · top-30 $9.5B of $9.5B total
Figure 2c
Import basket by HS chapter, 2024 · top-30 $6.1B of $6.5B total
Who it sells to
Figure 3a
World map of export destinations, 2024
Figure 3b
Top 12 export destinations, 2024
Economic complexity
The Economic Complexity Index (ECI) of Hidalgo & Hausmann (2009, PNAS) ranks countries by the productive knowledge embedded in their export basket. Countries that export many products, and whose products are also exported by few others, score high. ECI is predictive of subsequent income growth and structural transformation; see Hausmann et al. (2014, The Atlas of Economic Complexity, MIT Press) for the full methodology and the comparative country atlas.
Figure 4a
Burkina Faso: ECI trajectory, 1995-2024
Current ECI: -1.21, ranked #197 of 226 economies in 2024. ECI is zero-centered; positive values mean above-median complexity.
Method: Hidalgo & Hausmann (2009) “The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity” PNAS 106(26): 10570-10575. Applied to BACI RCA matrix.Figure 4b
Export concentration (HHI) and product count, 1995-2024
2024 HHI = 0.388, equivalent to about 2.6 equally-sized product lines.Burkina Faso exports 1,573 distinct HS6 products. Rising HHI or falling effective-N indicates loss of diversification.
Revealed comparative advantage (Balassa 1965) says a country is specialised in a product when its share of that product’s world exports exceeds the country’s share of all world exports. A stronger version asks: which HS6 lines does the country lead the world in? The table below lists the ten largest export lines (by value) where Burkina Faso ranks in the world top-5 in 2024, restricted to products with at least US$10M of global trade so tiny niches don’t crowd out economically meaningful positions. This is the “niche leadership” view: products the country is not just diversified in, but competitive at the frontier.
Figure 5
Burkina Faso: top 10 HS6 lines with world top-5 rank, 2024
Burkina Faso holds a top-5 world-export position in 1of its largest export lines (HS6 products with ≥ US$10M world trade, 2024). The leading niche is HS 230610 , Oil-cake and other solid residues: whether or not ground or , where it ranks #3 globally with 14.0% of world exports. Dominant niches are the revealed-comparative-advantage anchors a trade-shock or industrial- policy analysis should start from.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), HS6 exporter rankings, 2024. Restricted to products with ≥ US$10M world trade. Method: Balassa (1965) RCA taken to its rank-based extreme, top-5 world rank is a stringent specialisation test.
Peer countries by structural profile
Which economies share the closest structural profile to Burkina Faso? Each country is placed in a three-dimensional space of economic complexity (ECI), log GDP per capita, and log total exports, each standardised to zero mean and unit variance in 2024. The five nearest neighbours by Euclidean distance in that space are Burkina Faso’s closest structural peers, similar on productive-capability, income level, and scale of external trade. This is a trade-specific adaptation of the synthetic-control “donor pool” logic (Abadie, Diamond & Hainmueller 2010).
Figure 6
Burkina Faso: five closest structural peers, 2024
Closest structural peer: United Rep. of Tanzania (ECI -1.11, GDP-pc $1,187, exports $12.0B). Bar length encodes peer proximity in the standardised (ECI, log GDP-pc, log exports) space, shorter bars are closer structural matches. This is the peer set to benchmark trade-policy outcomes against, rather than regional or income-group aggregates. The metric matches on capability frontier and scale, not on sector mix, so countries with similar export composition but different ECI (e.g. higher-complexity apparel exporters) will not appear here.
Margins of export growth
Hummels & Klenow (2005, “The variety and quality of a nation’s exports,” American Economic Review 95(3): 704-723) decomposed cross-country export growth into the extensive margin (exporting more distinct HS6 lines) and the intensive margin (exporting more value per existing line). The decomposition is informative because the two margins respond to different policy levers: trade-cost reductions and discovery push the extensive margin (Melitz 2003), while productivity and demand push the intensive.
Figure 7
Margins of export growth, 2014-2024
Over 10 years, total exports grew at 10.6%/yr. Decomposition: HS6 line count moved from 1,401 to 1,573 (extensive margin 1.2%/yr); average value per line moved from $2.5M to $6.0M (intensive margin 9.3%/yr). The intensive margin dominates, which by Hummels-Klenow logic indicates growth via deepening sales of existing lines (productivity, scale, or quality).
Method: Hummels & Klenow (2005) AER 95(3): 704-723. Extensive margin = CAGR of distinct HS6 export lines. Intensive margin = CAGR of (total exports / line count). Total CAGR ≈ extensive + intensive (log-linear approximation).
Export basket on the complexity frontier
Figure 8
Burkina Faso: export value vs. product complexity (PCI), 2024
Related
Research index, analytical pieces grounded in BACI flows and gravity covariates
Sector monitor, quarterly deep dives on 12 HS-defined sectors
In 2024, the top three HS sections account for 96% of merchandise exports that map to an HS92 section, a rough measure of sectoral concentration at the coarsest classification level. Shares here are over BACI exports that carry a valid HS92 section mapping, so the five-section series does not sum to 100% of total exports: some HS6 codes (newer HS revisions, non-standard codes) fall outside the 21-section mapping. Note that the top-5 sections are selected by 2024 share, so a section that was dominant in 1995 but has since fallen out of the top 5 will not appear on the chart.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28) crossed with HS92 section codes. Shares are over the HS6-mapped universe; HS6 codes without an HS92 section fall outside the 21-section totals.
Cell area is proportional to 2024 export value. The treemap shows the top 30 HS chapters (HS2 level) of Burkina Faso’s exports; cells are colour-coded by HS section so structurally related chapters share a hue (e.g. minerals, machinery, textiles). The largest chapter, HS 71 , Natural, cultured pearls; precious, semi-precious stones; precious metals, metals clad with precious metal, and articles thereof; imitation jewellery; coin, represents 87.4% of the top-30chapter total shown. Compared to Figure 2’s five-section trajectory, this view exposes which specific chapters within the dominant sections drive the overall composition.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), f.o.b. exports of HS6 codes aggregated to HS2 chapters, 2024. Restricted to top 30 chapters by value.
Cell area is proportional to 2024 import value. The treemap shows the top 30 HS chapters (HS2 level) of Burkina Faso’s imports; cells are colour-coded by HS section so structurally related chapters share a hue. The largest import chapter, HS 27 , Mineral fuels, mineral oils and products of their distillation; bituminous substances; mineral waxes, represents 34.8% of the top-30 chapter total shown. Read alongside Figure 2b to compare what Burkina Faso sells abroad against what it buys in.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), c.i.f. imports of HS6 codes aggregated to HS2 chapters, 2024. Restricted to top 30 chapters by value.
Each country is shaded by the bilateral value of Burkina Faso’s exports to it in 2024, binned into quintiles. Burkina Faso itself is tinted in amber as the origin; white indicates destinations with no recorded bilateral flow. The map makes regional dependency structures visible, neighbours, former colonial ties, bloc partners, in ways a top-list ordering hides.
Partner concentration measures market exposure. The single largest destination absorbs 67% of Burkina Faso’s exports; the top 3 together take 87%. Concentrated partner bases make bilateral shocks (trade wars, recessions) first-order.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), bilateral exports 2024. Shares are over total exports.
Method: z-score each dimension (ECI, log GDP-pc, log total exports) across the universe of countries with all three observations in the latest year; rank by Euclidean distance. Abadie, Diamond & Hainmueller (2010) “Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies,” JASA 105(490): 493-505.
Each dot is one HS6 product in Burkina Faso’s basket with more than US$1M in exports in 2024 (long-tail marginal exports below that floor are filtered out so the scatter is legible; the filter drops many HS6 codes for small economies and few for large ones). Horizontal = export value (log), vertical = Product Complexity Index (PCI). Dots upper-right are high-value, high-complexity products (machinery, precision instruments). Lower-left products carry less productive knowledge per dollar. A basket shifted toward the upper-right correlates with higher ECI and higher income.
Method: PCI from Hausmann-Hidalgo (2009) spectral-eigenvector decomposition of the country-product RCA matrix. Basket restricted to HS6 exports > US$1M in the latest year.
Burkina Faso trade-riskGlobal risk rank #120 of 200 (board)
supplier concentration86.7%
price stress 12m15.4%
price coverage30.3%
Dependency diagnosis
Vegetable oils: palm oil and its fractions, other than crude, whether or not refined, but not chemically modified(151190): you import 92.3% from Côte d'Ivoire. STRUCTURAL Structural scarcity, world export HHI 0.41. Switching suppliers will not fix this; the world itself is concentrated (top alternatives: IDN 55.2%, MYS 32.6%, NLD 2.5%, ITA 0.9%). Policy: stockpile, substitute the input, or invest in allied/domestic production.
Telephones for cellular networks or for other wireless networks(851712): you import 79.7% from China. UNKNOWN World concentration unavailable for this product code.
Lamps: portable, electric, designed to function by their own source of energy (excluding lighting equipment of heading no. 8512)(851310): you import 96.6% from China. STRUCTURAL Structural scarcity, world export HHI 0.68. Switching suppliers will not fix this; the world itself is concentrated (top alternatives: DEU 2.5%, USA 2.3%, FRA 1.2%, VNM 1.2%). Policy: stockpile, substitute the input, or invest in allied/domestic production.
Fish: frozen, tilapias (Oreochromis spp.), excluding fillets, livers, roes, and other fish meat of heading 0304(030323): you import 99.3% from China. UNKNOWN World concentration unavailable for this product code.
Spirits, liqueurs and other spirituous beverages: n.e.s. in heading no. 2208(220890): you import 99.9% from Unknown. DIVERSIFIABLE Diversifiable, you are single-sourced but world supply is broad (HHI 0.14). Realistic alternatives: MEX 33.7%, FRA 8.1%, ITA 7.7%, CHN 5.8%. Policy: spread procurement across these suppliers.
Footwear: n.e.s. in heading no. 6402, (other than just covering the ankle), with outer soles and uppers of rubber or plastics(640299): you import 51.5% from Côte d'Ivoire. STRUCTURAL Structural scarcity, world export HHI 0.32. Switching suppliers will not fix this; the world itself is concentrated (top alternatives: CHN 52.8%, VNM 17.8%, IDN 5.9%, DEU 4.0%). Policy: stockpile, substitute the input, or invest in allied/domestic production.
Data processing machines: portable, digital and automatic, weighing not more than 10kg, consisting of at least a central processing unit, a keyboard and a display(847130): you import 61.3% from Unknown. UNKNOWN World concentration unavailable for this product code.
Furnishing articles: of cotton, not knitted or crocheted (excluding bedspreads and articles of heading no. 9404)(630492): you import 99.7% from India. STRUCTURAL Structural scarcity, world export HHI 0.27. Switching suppliers will not fix this; the world itself is concentrated (top alternatives: CHN 26.2%, PAK 4.3%, DEU 2.7%, ROU 2.6%). Policy: stockpile, substitute the input, or invest in allied/domestic production.
Compound exposures
These flows carry multiple simultaneous stressors on the same product; the averaged risk score understates them.
Vegetable oils: palm oil and its fractions, other than crude, whether or not refined, but not chemically modified from Côte d'Ivoire: single-source (92.3%) + price +15% over 12m.
GeoDep 2022, world shares latest BACI year, Pink Sheet 2026M04. No real-time signal is implied.
where Burkina Faso is exposed
Vegetable oils: palm oil and its fractions, other than crude, whether or not refined, but not chemically modified (151190): imports 92% from Côte d'Ivoire (CIV). Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure. Model a supply shock →
Telephones for cellular networks or for other wireless networks (851712): imports 80% from China (CHN). Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure. Model a supply shock →
Lamps: portable, electric, designed to function by their own source of energy (excluding lighting equipment of heading no. 8512) (851310): imports 97% from China (CHN). Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure. Model a supply shock →
Fish: frozen, tilapias (Oreochromis spp.), excluding fillets, livers, roes, and other fish meat of heading 0304 (030323): imports 99% from China (CHN). Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure. Model a supply shock →
Spirits, liqueurs and other spirituous beverages: n.e.s. in heading no. 2208 (220890): imports 100% from Unknown (EUN). Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure. Model a supply shock →
where Burkina Faso could grow
Anti-knock preparations: based on lead compounds (381111): proximity 0.01 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +3.01, world market $65.5m. Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024). See product →
Vinyl chloride, other halogenated olefin polymers: vinylidene chloride polymers, in primary forms (390450): proximity 0.01 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +3.22, world market $311.1m. Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024). See product →
Metal: precious or metal clad with precious metal, other than that of item no. 7115.10 (711590): proximity 0.03 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +1.22, world market $9.6bn. Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024). See product →
Optical elements: polarising material, sheets and plates thereof (900120): proximity 0.01 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +6.68, world market $4.5bn. Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024). See product →
Machinery: parts for filtering or purifying liquids or gases (842199): proximity 0.01 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +2.80, world market $17.7bn. Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024). See product →