Policies in Côte d’Ivoire CIV, in contrast, is widely viewed as having started down a more marketbased, export-oriented path in a way that should have helped the rural agricultural sector, where most of the population and most people living in
poverty were located. But this did not prevent elites from extracting what they could from the rural areas. In fact, there were a number of policy lurches. An apparently favorable tactic may have been an early policy of effectively trying to keep all the ethnic groups engaged in and benefiting from growth in the national economy.