Commodities & Energy

Cet essai analyse la guerre Iran–États-Unis–Israël de 2026 comme un révélateur de la transformation profonde de l’ordre international. À travers le prisme du droit de la mer, du détroit d’Ormuz, des alliances fragmentées, des câbles sous-marins et des flux énergétiques, il montre que le pouvoir mondial se déplace progressivement du contrôle des territoires vers la maîtrise des infrastructures de circulation. Loin de disparaître, la mondialisation entre dans une phase de connectivité ...

This Policy Paper has also been published in French and Spanish by Le Grand Continent Morocco offers a compelling example of how a middle-income economy can navigate a more fragmented global environment, characterized by weak growth and slower convergence. Since 2022, economic activity has remained relatively strong, with growth exceeding that of many comparable economies. Non-agricultural growth has averaged 4.4% since 2022, around 1.3 percentage points above its historical av ...

Africa is facing a massive electricity deficit that is impacting its economic and social development, and its ability to catch up with the rest of the world. It is imperative that the continent increase its electricity production to connect the 600 million people who are currently without access and to improve the quality of service for the millions who are suffering from frequent blackouts and load-shedding. Economic development in the 21st century will crucially depend on the digi ...

Africa today remains far from food secure. Chronic malnutrition, widespread anemia among women of childbearing age, stunting and wasting among young children, pervasive underemployment in both rural and urban areas, and a youth bulge frustrated by high unemployment are key features of a continent that is seriously off track with respect to the SDG deadline: only 6% of SDGs have been implemented (Mo Ibrahim Forum, 2025).Despite this dismal progress, Africa can still achieve “The Afri ...

L’Afrique atlantique émerge aujourd’hui comme un espace de réflexion stratégique majeur. Longtemps envisagée sous l’angle de sa fragmentation ou de sa marginalité relative dans les grands récits géopolitiques, cette façade maritime tend désormais à être appréhendée comme un ensemble en devenir, structuré par des dynamiques géopolitiques, économiques et sécuritaires de plus en plus intenses. C’est dans cette perspective qu’a été initié le Africa Maritime Symposium (AMS), dont la ...

Geopolitical rivalries, and especially the competition for access to critical minerals, could be an opportunity for Africa. The objective of African mineral exporters is to diversify their partners and increase processing and value addition on the continent in order to create jobs and enhance export revenues.[1] To succeed, African exporters of critical minerals need to strengthen their coordination and develop joint infrastructure projects and regional value chains. The creation of ...

This article draws in part on perspectives shared by members of the Rihla Initiative for Green Economic Growth, whose regional insights helped inform the sections on how the costs of the war are being felt across the Global South. The war on Iran and in the Gulf has made it impossible to treat the Strait of Hormuz as a regional issue. The disruption around the Strait has moved through the world economy in concrete ways, from higher fuel bills and pressure on food and fertilizer ...

The global energy system has entered a period of acute structural stress following the strikes by the United States and Israel on Iran in late February 2026, and the subsequent disruption of flows through the Strait of Hormuz. According to the International Energy Agency, the resulting shock marks the most severe disruption to global energy markets since the 1970s oil crises, with systemic characteristics comparable to the combined effects of those crises and the 2022 Russia-Ukraine ...

This Opinion was originally published on dev-front.org, by Hafez Ghanem, Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South.Joe Studwell has spent most of his career working on Asia and brings an interesting fresh perspective on the economics of Africa. This makes the book worth reading even if one disagrees with some conclusions.   The book’s main argument is that Africa should follow the Asian model of first focusing on smallholder agriculture, then labor intensive manufact ...

In 2017, eight scientists from the Google research team published in the journal Advances in Neural Info Processing Systems the remarkable article “Attention is all you need,” which introduced a Transformer neural network architecture. The paper has been cited over 173,000 times and ranks among the top 100 most cited papers of the 21st century. It builds on the attention principle introduced in 2014 by Bahdanau, Cho and Turing Award winner Bengio, who proposed neural machine transla ...

The energy shock caused by the war between the United States and Israel and Iran has highlighted the need for Africa to refine more of its own crude oil. Africa is a net hydrocarbon exporter, but remains stuck in the old colonial economic model: it mostly exports raw materials and imports refined products. Africa exports about 2.6 billion barrels of crude oil every year, and imports about 1.4 billion barrels of refined products. This is a problem for two reasons. First, Africa ...

Driven by its mission to reflect on and analyze the major geopolitical, economic, and societal transformations shaping the contemporary world, and with a view to contributing to knowledge-sharing and disseminating the main outcomes of its research program, the Policy Center for the New South regularly publishes collective volumes addressing issues of particular importance to Morocco, Africa, and the broader Global/New South. In this spirit, the Center has recently released two volum ...

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This Paper was originally published on tandfonline.com This paper examines how reductions in transportation costs reshape regional economic and environmental outcomes in Morocco. We simulate a reduction in delivered (purchasers’) costs via a transport-margin efficiency improvement – implemented as a margin-saving technical change in the transport sector – within a province-level Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) framework. Simulating a 1% decline in transport costs, ...

Decarbonization is reconfiguring global relative prices. As clean energy, natural capital, and location-specific assets become dominant industrial inputs, the relative cost of producing low-carbon goods is increasingly determined by geography. Two systematic distortions explain why the expected reallocation of investment toward renewable-rich economies remains incomplete. First, industrial policy interventions, including subsidies, trade barriers, and certification systems, disconne ...

Gaspillage de l’eau et son mésusage : deux facteurs du stress hydriqueCe Policy Brief est consacré aux phénomènes de gaspillage et de mésusage de l’eau: deux impératifs de la lutte contre le stress hydrique, rappelés, avec insistance, par   Sa Majesté le Roi Mohammed VI dans son discours du 29 juillet 2024, à l’occasion de la célébration du 25ème anniversaire de son accession au Trône. La première partie de l’étude aborde la problématique générale du gaspillage e ...

Climate policy is increasingly reshaping the conditions under which firms participate in international markets. As some jurisdictions introduce carbon border adjustments, lifecycle emissions standards, and supply-chain traceability requirements, market access is starting to be made conditional on verifiable characteristics of production processes, such as carbon intensity, embedded emissions, and input sourcing, rather than solely on product characteristics or prices. This paper exa ...

We are now in the fifth week since the U.S. airstrike that killed top leaders of the Iranian regime, initiating a war involving the United States and Israel against the country. More than a month of mutual bombardments between Iran and Israel has ensued, extending to other Persian Gulf nations, U.S. military installations—and even Cyprus. From a global perspective, the impact has stemmed primarily from disruptions to regional production of goods and the blockade of the Strait of Hor ...