Abstract
The regional bond market of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC), organized around the Bourse des Valeurs Mobilières de l'Afrique Centrale (BVMAC) and the securities settlement infrastructure of the Banque des États de l'Afrique Centrale (BEAC), remains an order of magnitude smaller and shallower than its structural analogue in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), organized around the Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières (BRVM) and UMOA-Titres. At the end of 2025, CEMAC's total bond market outstanding stood at approximately FCFA 1,305.3 billion, against a UEMOA bond market capitalization of roughly FCFA 10,495.8 billion in the same year—a gap of nearly eightfold between two currency unions sharing a common peg, comparable population scale, and broadly similar colonial-era civil law inheritance.
This paper undertakes a close textual comparison of the CEMAC and UEMOA regulatory architectures governing public and private debt issuance, benchmarks primary and secondary market activity over 2016–2025 using BEAC, BVMAC, BRVM, and UMOA-Titres data, and identifies four structural constraints specific to CEMAC that plausibly explain the divergence: (i) the absence of a centralized, standardized issuance platform comparable to SAGETIL-UMOA; (ii) the underdevelopment of the Spécialistes en Valeurs du Trésor (SVT) secondary-market obligation regime relative to its UEMOA counterpart; (iii) the absence of a tax incentive for resident investors comparable to UEMOA's IRVM exemption; and (iv) a narrower and less diversified issuer base, both sovereign and corporate.
The paper closes with a set of regulatory design recommendations addressed to BEAC, BVMAC, and the Commission de Surveillance du Marché Financier de l'Afrique Centrale (COSUMAF), several of which are already being tentatively tested through BVMAC's 2026 Enterprise Support Program.