The 2013 Import and Export Market for Cocoa Beans in Ghana

On the demand side, exporters and strategic planners focusing on cocoa beans in Ghana face a number of questions. Which countries are supplying cocoa beans to Ghana? How important is Ghana compared to others in terms of the entire global and regional market? How much do the imports of cocoa beans vary from one country of origin to another in Ghana? On the supply side, Ghana also exports cocoa beans. Which countries receive the most exports from Ghana? How are these exports concentrated across buyers? What is the value of these exports and which countries are the largest buyers? This report was created for strategic planners, international marketing executives and import/export managers who are concerned with the market for cocoa beans in Ghana. With the globalization of this market, managers can no longer be contented with a local view. Nor can managers be contented with out-of-date statistics which appear several years after the fact. I have developed a methodology, based on macroeconomic and trade models, to estimate the market for cocoa beans for those countries serving Ghana via exports, or supplying from Ghana via imports. It does so for the current year based on a variety of key historical indicators and econometric models. In what follows, Chapter 2 begins by summarizing where Ghana fits into the world market for imported and exported cocoa beans. The total level of imports and exports on a worldwide basis, and those for Ghana in particular, is estimated using a model which aggregates across over 150 key country markets and projects these to the current year. From there, each country represents a percent of the world market. This market is served from a number of competitive countries of origin. Based on both demand- and supply-side dynamics, market shares by country of origin are then calculated across each country market destination. These shares lead to a volume of import and export values for each country and are