COVID-19

Dans cette nouvelle édition du Rapport annuel sur la géopolitique de l’Afrique, et à l’instar des éditions précédentes, le maître-mot est la richesse dans la diversité. Une diversité dans les visions et les opinions que des auteurs africains, habitués de cette tribune où qui la découvrent, alimentent en exprimant leurs réflexions sur des questions clés qui intéressent leur continent : l’Afrique. Du cadre social, à celui militaire en passant par les contextes historiques, anthropolo ...

Emerging market and developing economies (EMDE) face a common set of external shocks: rising energy and food prices; tightening in global financial conditions caused by the prospect of sharper interest rate hikes and anticipation of "quantitative tightening"; and return of restrictions on mobility in China, on account of the Covid zero policy, leading to slumping in growth and weakening one of the primary growth drivers for the other EMDE. However, the impacts of those common shocks ...

He is 81 years old, and obviously, his job is not joyful. Or, rather some people he is dealing with, are not just angry about him, but outright murderous. Just a few days before Christmas, a man identified as Kuachua Brillion Xiong, was stopped by police on a highway in the state of Iowa, his car loaded with an AR 15 assault rifle, ammunition, and body armor (Des Moines Register, December 30, 2021) The  25-year-old Californian resident was on his way to Washington, DC- to kill ...

Between January 2020 and June 2021, the world spent about US $16.5 trillion (18% of world GDP) to fight COVID-19, and this amount does not even include the most important losses such as deaths, mental health effects, restrictions on human freedom, and other nonmonetary suffering. Nearly 90% of this amount was spent by developed economies; the rest by emerging market and developing economies. Low-income countries spent just US $12.5 billion, or less than 0.0001% of the total. Moreove ...

Scarcity of inputs and goods has been felt all over the world because of disruptions to global value chains since the beginning of the pandemic. Factory closures in China at the beginning of 2020, lockdowns in many countries and, subsequently, congestion in logistics networks for transporting goods, capacity constraints in the face of sudden increases in demand, and labor shortages, have combined to negatively affect the availability of inputs and products worldwide. Higher freight ...

The current global pattern of democratic retrenchment has multiple causes, including economic inequality, American imperial overreach, and increased migration, all of which have led to disillusionment with democratic systems, and inspired a populist demand for populist leaders. This populist wave has also led to the personalization of political regimes, democratic and authoritarian, with power highly concentrated in the hands of a single individual, as seen in Turkey, Philippines, P ...

Official statistics record more than 4.6 million people as dying of COVID-19 across the world, a population roughly equal to that of New Zealand. About 10,000 people continue to die of the disease every day. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that the number of COVID-19 deaths is underreported in many instances. For example, a continuously updated database of estimated COVID-19 deaths by The Economist suggests that the actual number of deaths across the world could be two to thre ...

When Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez tested positive for COVID-19 on his 62nd birthday, April 2, 2021 it might not have seemed unusual when there have been almost 200 million cases worldwide. But the leader of Argentina received two doses of the Russian vaccine Sputnik V, on January and in February 2021, a virus terminator advertised by Moscow as potent like almost no other on the globe, with an efficiency rate given by Russia’s Gamaleya Institute at 96.1%. The risk of infec ...

There is not much of an argument: some countries in mighty Africa faced and mastered the COVID-19 invasion as efficiently, or even better, than any nation on the globe, including former colonial powers in Europe. By June 2021, 140,400 Africans had died, compared to more than 500,000 virus victims in Brazil, or 600,000 plus in the U.S. Some experts explain the result as a product of long experience from a multitude of previous health crises: Ebola, AIDS/HIV, malaria, tuberculosis. Ot ...

Abdelhak Bassou is one of the leading national and African security experts. He is a Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South and a highly appreciated professor at the elite University Mohammed VI, near Marrakech. His opinions provoke thoughts and comments, just as they should. The Policy Center for the New South’s Annual Report on Africa’s Geopolitics, coordinated by Mr. Bassou, contains numerous reports on the damaging effects of COVID-19 on Africa’s societies: ‘I ...

The International Monetary Fund’s tenth annual External Sector Report (ESR, August 2021) shows how current account deficits in the global economy widened in 2020 during the pandemic. On the other hand, the ESR also argues that overall, the misalignment between fundamentals and current account balances has not been exacerbated. The pandemic widened current account imbalances… The sum of absolute values of current account deficits and surpluses went from 2.8% of global GDP in 2019 t ...

Frappée de plein fouet par la crise sanitaire de la Covid-19, la République de Zambie, déjà fragilisée, fait face à de nombreux défis sur les plans politique, économique, social et climatique. Outre sa position géographique de pays enclavé, le croissant de l’Afrique australe se positionne comme l’une des premières victimes du réchauffement climatique sur le continent rendant vulnérable une partie de sa population souffrant d’insécurité alimentaire accrue. Par ailleurs, et à l’approc ...

Cette édition du Rapport géopolitique de l’Afrique, la quatrième, s’inscrit dans la droite ligne de la philosophie et de l’esprit du Policy Center for the New South, qui milite pour une Afrique partie intégrante du Sud global et acteur, en devenir, dans les affaires mondiales. L’Afrique comme continent et comme espace est le théâtre où se déploient les actions des Africains pour réagir et interagir avec les conjonctures internationales, et l’Afrique comme populations et institutions ...

The Policy Brief ‘Pandemic, Preparedness, Morocco, and Africa’ by Uri Dadush provoked a personal reaction: Morocco may never be crowned football’s world champions, alas, but which nation, besides China, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Denmark, Vietnam, organized its anti-COVID-19 offensive more digitally and in a more modern way than the Kingdom? Morocco’s bureaucracy is at times suffocating and unpleasant, its public hospital system stressed and underfunded. But today I can v ...