📄 Abstract
This study investigates the Borderland Trap, a self-reinforcing mechanism linking institutional rent extraction at the Elubo crossing on the Ghana-Cote d'Ivoire border to household capital erosion and livelihood fragility. A mixed-methods design combined a household survey (350 ICBT-dependent, 150 comparison households), trip transaction logs (1,098 trips from 30 traders), 16-week financial diaries (40 households), focus group discussions, life histories, and key informant interviews. Six propositions and three rival mechanisms were tested. Unofficial payments were predominantly additional to formal duties (76.5 per cent of trips) and regressive (elasticity below unity). Women faced higher costs (d = 0.43) including non-monetary demands. Of trips carrying goods entitled to ECOWAS duty-free passage, 64.1 per cent were charged. Border extraction exceeded kin redistribution by 2.87 to 1. The study contributes to poverty trap theory by specifying an institutionally sited erosion mechanism, to borderland studies by linking checkpoint governance to household outcomes, and to ECOWAS policy by documenting the implementation failure converting a liberalisation instrument into an extraction site.
🏷️ Keywords
📚 How to Cite:
Fermah Ezekiel Bosso, Isaac Wilmot , Essah Paulina Adobea, Dan Zhou , THE BORDERLAND TRAP: INSTITUTIONAL RENT EXTRACTION, CAPITAL EROSION, AND LIVELIHOOD FRAGILITY AT THE GHANA-COTE D'IVOIRE BORDER , Volume 14 , Issue 11, November 2026, EPRA International Journal of Economic and Business Review(JEBR) , Pages: 53 - 63 , DOI: https://doi.org/10.36713/epra29080