Country profile / CMR
Cameroon
Use this profile to establish Cameroon’s economic scale, locate its financial structure among reporting peers, trace credit and crisis history, and read its sovereign and external balance sheets. Follow any section into the dedicated module, or audit the primary source cited beside it.
Cross-border banking exposure: how much BIS-reporting banks lend to Cameroon.
Economic scale
Cameroon's population rose over the reported history
Source: Penn World Table 11.0 (Feenstra, Inklaar and Timmer 2015). License: CC BY 4.0. Methodology
Crisis history
Full crisis atlas →1 episode between 1987 and 1997. Consecutive crisis years are merged into episodes (gaps of up to two years bridged); each links to its episode page.
Source: Global Macro Database 2026_06 | Reinhart-Rogoff (HBS BFFS) | Laeven & Valencia (2020, 2026) | Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database | ECB/ESRB Financial Crises Database. License: non-commercial research (inherits GMD / JST); cite all five chronologies. Methodology
Early-warning gauge
Model and evaluation →The crisis early-warning model (ews-1.0) scores Cameroon from realized data only: features dated 2024 or earlier, no forecasts and no nowcasts. 4 of the model’s 7 features are observed here, and the score places Cameroon in decile 6 of 10 among the 196 countries carrying a current row.
- Credit-to-GDP gap (pp) [missing] -0.39
- Real credit growth, 3y (%) [missing] -0.27
- CPI inflation (%) = 4.5 -0.07
An early-warning score flags a macro-financial configuration that resembles past pre-crisis years; it is not a forecast for Cameroon. At the published operating threshold (p ≥ 12.5%), the era-blocked out-of-sample backtest gives precision 16.9% and recall 25.7%: most flags did not precede an onset, and most onset years went unflagged.
Source: Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory R6 | Laeven & Valencia (2026), IMF WP/26/94 | BIS credit-to-GDP gap and total credit (Data Portal) | Global Macro Database (release 2026_06). License: non-commercial research (inherits GMD / JST). Model ews-1.0, data vintage jst-r6(2020);lv-2026-wp2694(2023);bis-gap(2025-Q4);gmd-2026_06(cut2024). Methodology
Financial structure
Cameroon's private bank credit is below the reporting-economy median
Source: World Bank Global Financial Development Database (Sep 2022). License: CC BY 4.0. Values end 2021 (GFDD's last release year). Methodology
Financial development
Cameroon's financial development index is below the reporting-economy median
Source: IMF Financial Development Index (IMF.MCM:FDI) | Svirydzenka (2016), IMF Working Paper WP/16/5. License: IMF, public open data with "Source: IMF, Financial Development Index" attribution. 0-1 scale; served values end 2020 (183 economies). Methodology
Bank soundness
Cameroon's nonperforming-loan ratio is above the reporting-economy median
Source: IMF Financial Soundness Indicators (FSI). License: IMF, free with "Source: IMF, Financial Soundness Indicators" attribution. Methodology
Financial inclusion
How much of the adult population (age 15+) is inside the financial system, from the World Bank Global Findex 2025: account ownership, digital payments, and formal saving and borrowing. Findex is a survey run in waves, not annually, so each card is a wave sparkline with the latest reading and the change since the first wave available for Cameroon.
Source: World Bank Global Findex Database 2025. License: CC BY 4.0. Survey waves; percent of adults age 15+. Methodology
Credit cycle
Cameroon is not in the BIS credit-statistics reporting set, so no credit-to-GDP gap, debt-service ratio, or property-price series is available here.
Source: BIS credit and debt-service statistics | BIS residential property prices. License: free with "Source: BIS" attribution. Methodology
Policy, shadow and exchange rates
Cameroon is in none of the BIS central-bank policy-rate set (48 economies), the Krippner shadow short rate set, or the BIS real broad effective-exchange-rate set (63 economies), so no monetary-stance or exchange-rate series is available here.
Source: BIS central bank policy rates | BIS effective exchange rates | Krippner shadow short rate estimates (LJK Limited). License: BIS series are free with "Source: BIS" attribution; Krippner shadow-rate estimates are cited as model estimates from LJK Limited and are not republished as bulk data. Methodology
External position
Cameroon runs a current-account deficit
Remittance inflows are shown as external-flow context (household income received from abroad), not a FinObservatory risk score.
Source: IMF Balance of Payments and IIP Statistics | World Bank, Total reserves (FI.RES.TOTL.CD). License: IMF and World Bank, free with attribution ("Source: IMF"; World Bank reserves CC BY 4.0). Methodology
Source: Chinn-Ito index of capital-account openness (Chinn and Ito 2006). License: research use with citation only (Chinn-Ito); not for commercial redistribution. Methodology
Source: World Bank / KNOMAD Migration and Remittances Data. License: CC BY 4.0 (World Bank / KNOMAD). Methodology
International borrowing
General government are Cameroon's largest reported international issuer sector
Source: BIS debt securities statistics (international debt securities). License: free with "Source: BIS" attribution. Methodology
Income and wealth inequality
Cross-country inequality →How concentrated Cameroon’s income and wealth are. Top shares come from WID.world on equal-split adults (each adult in a couple assigned half the couple’s total); income (a flow) and wealth (a stock) are shown as distinct measures and never combined into one figure. The Gini coefficients are survey-based, on a 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (maximal concentration) scale: the World Bank PIP survey Gini and, where covered, the OECD disposable-income (post-tax, post-transfer) Gini. Each reading shows its year and, where a cross-country distribution exists, where Cameroon sits among reporting economies. WID extends its most recent years by extrapolation, so a latest reading is an estimate.
Source: WID.world (World Inequality Database) | World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform | OECD Income Distribution Database. License: WID.world and OECD IDD: display-with-attribution (owner no-redistribution ruling); World Bank PIP: CC BY 4.0. Top shares on equal-split adults; recent WID years are extrapolated. Ginis are survey-based and measure a different object from the fiscal top shares. Methodology
Sovereign debt
Full debt trajectory →Latest government debt 39.5% of GDP (2024, Central govt (IMF GDD)). Peak 106.5% in 1995. This is below the 80.7% median at which 2000+ sovereign crises began (a comparison, not a prediction).
Source: IMF Global Debt Database | IMF World Economic Outlook. License: IMF, free with "Source: IMF" attribution. Methodology
Financial-crime status
FATF status detail →Cameroon is on the FATF Jurisdictions under Increased Monitoring as of the 19 June 2026 statement. FATF’s per-indicator assessment ratings (R.1-R.40 / IO.1-IO.11) are not reproduced here. This is official list membership only, not a FinObservatory risk score.
Source: FATF, High-Risk and Other Monitored Jurisdictions (19 June 2026). License: FATF copyright; membership reproduced with attribution. Methodology
Reading this profile
- This page composes existing FinObservatory layers; it introduces no new data. Every figure is reproducible from the source cited in its section. See the methodology for the composition and each source’s coverage and staleness.
- The peer line on a card (“N economies report; median…”) places this country’s latest reading among every reporting economy’s own latest reading for the same indicator, under the same filters. Latest years differ where reporting lags. It is a descriptive position (a count and a median), not a score; for indicators where lower is safer, such as nonperforming loans, a high position is not a good one.
- The layers stop at different dates: the World Bank GFDD depth and soundness series end 2021 and the IMF Financial Development Index ends 2020, but the IMF FSI soundness panel is current (annual through 2024–2025 where reported); the Global Findex inclusion series are surveyed in waves and reach 2024; IMF debt runs to 2024; the Penn World Table runs 1950–2023; and the BIS statistics are the most current (credit through 2025, residential property to 2026Q1, and the policy rate and effective exchange rate into 2026 where reported). Krippner's month-end shadow short rate estimates, where this page has them, run 1995-01-31 to 2026-06-30 and are model estimates rather than observed policy rates. The external accounts reach 2025 (IMF balance-of-payments and reserves), 2024 (remittance inflows) and 2023 (capital-account openness). A quiet recent tail in one section can simply be where that source stops.
- Where a source has no reading for Cameroon, the section says so in words instead of drawing a chart. A stated absence means the underlying dataset does not cover this country, not that the value is zero.
Ask the analyst about this page
Grounded answers with citations; the model never generates a number.