The fact that the AOF and the AEF had a single currency pegged to the metropolitan franc allowed the colonial administrations and metropolitan companies to significantly reduce their transaction costs. If the various territories under the French administration had each had their own floating currency, regulating commercial transactions would have been more complicated and expensive. The CFA system also helped organise economic exchanges according to the imperatives of the 'colonial pact'. The fact that the CFA franc's parity was set at an artificially high level, as we saw in Chapter 1, penalised African products: they were hard to sell on world markets, except in the context of the commercial preferences granted by the metropole. Conversely, the high external value of the CFA franc favoured imports, especially from the metropole. The functioning of the banking system of the franc zone also served to orient the allocation of resources in such a way as to further benefit the metropole and its operators: bank credit was mainly reserved for those sectors whose products were exported to the metropole and generated foreign currency, to the detriment of productions destined for national markets.

Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa's Last Colonial Curr…, loc. 128