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 ...

Il y a, désormais, un avant et un après Coronavirus dans le récit de l’histoire de l’humanité de ce XXIème siècle. L’épidémie du Coronavirus représente sans doute le point de rupture historique symbolique d’une nouvelle reconfiguration du monde. La crise sanitaire planétaire s’est imposée à nous et a brutalement chamboulé un mode de vie que l’on pensait éternel et presque invincible alors, qu’au fait, elle n’a fait que révéler ce qui longtemps était en état de latence : un monde dan ...

يأتي فاتح مايو من هذا العام في ظرف استثنائي جدا، يتسم بالقلق وعدم اليقين بشأن المستقبل، بعد أن بدت مختلف الحكومات و المنظمات الإقليمية و الدولية غير  قادرة على رسم توقعات واقعية لتجاوز الأزمة الوبائية الحالية. إذ كلما مرت الأيام، زاد منسوب الخوف من احتمال وقوع كارثة اقتصادية قد تؤدي إلى مزيد من المعاناة في أوساط الفئات الهشة، وتضيق هامش القوة العاملة في رفع مطالبها المتراكمة منذ سنوات. دول منعت خروج الفعاليات النقابية للاحتفال بعيد العمل، وأخرى حذرت من التجمعات، وثالثة فرضت قي ...

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of history” (George Orwell) It was one of those years to forget. In 2020, three million citizens worldwide were killed by a devastating virus. How should we deal with COVID-19’s tragedies in the post-virus phase? Winston Churchill’s wisdom may help avoid another cataclysm: “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, he is supposed to have said. The source o ...

It was an illusion. A dream or wishful thinking—and some fake news. Scientists would develop a vaccine at break-neck speed. It would be available for all, wealthy nations sharing with the poor. But unfortunately the COVID-19 deaths continue to mount. The world is facing a maddening bottleneck, predicted in October 2020 by the Policy Center for the New South on its opinion page, quoting scientists calculations that twelve to fifteen billion vaccine shots were needed, but gl ...

L’Afrique a perdu 70 % de ses arrivées touristiques en 2020, selon le dernier baromètre de l’Organisation mondiale du tourisme (OMT), soit un peu moins que la moyenne mondiale (74 %). Au début de la crise, l’Union africaine (UA) s’inquiétait surtout pour les petits pays insulaires fortement dépendants du tourisme. Les Seychelles ont perdu 71 % de leurs visiteurs en 2020, avec 114 850 arrivées contre 384 000 en 2019, et 61 % de leurs revenus touristiques. Lourde ...

Brazil, an oil-exporting nation, was still struggling to recover from the depression which started around 2014/15 when it was hit by a quick succession of shocks: the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil price collapse. The global pandemic triggered major economic dislocations and contractions in foreign and domestic markets, which further exacerbated the fall in demand for oil, sending world prices tumbling further. Poverty was already widespread in Brazil pre-pandemic. And despite recen ...

This article was originally published on IMF blog.  The road to recovery for the Middle East and Central Asia region will hinge on containment measures, access to and distribution of vaccines, the scope of policies to support growth, and measures to mitigate economic scarring from the pandemic. The virus’s second wave, which began in September, hurt many countries in the region, where infection and death rates far surpassed those seen during the first wave . Most countrie ...

WASHINGTON-The December 2020 U.S. Treasury Report (hereafter referred to as the TR) to Congress singled out Vietnam and Switzerland as currency manipulators. In Vietnam’s case, it is surprising that the U.S. Treasury openly expressed its concerns about a country that graduated from the group of low-income countries only a few years ago. Additionally, Vietnam’s GDP per capita and total GDP are a fraction of the U.S.’s, but the country is assessed in the same way as developed countrie ...

Getting vaccines into the arms of the right people, those most at risk of dying from the disease, could radically reduce the death rate from COVID-19 within months. It would also normalise the situation in hospitals, trigger a swifter economic recovery than is widely anticipated, and dramatically reduce the need for borrowing by governments that future generations will have to repay. Vaccination has become even more urgent as new, more infectious strains of the virus have spread to ...