Economic growth

The monetary policy report submitted by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to the U.S. Congress on Friday Feb. 19 showed that the Fed’s members have improved economic growth expectations for 2021 and 2022, expect lower unemployment rates. Meanwhile, only two of the 18 participants projected PCE (personal consumption expenditures) inflation to (slightly) exceed the 2% that serves as the longer-run objective for the monetary policy regime. In this context, is there ...

According to this month’s OECD economic outlook, global GDP --- which took a huge hit from the pandemic and is still 3% below its level of a year ago – will not recover its pre-pandemic level until the end of 2021. In a downside scenario, the return could take almost a year longer. The OECD predictions, which imply high and protracted unemployment, are in line with the view of many other official and private organizations. The arrival of effective vaccines such as Pfizer-BioNTech wa ...

Africa is experiencing economic growth deceleration that reached 2.9% on average between 2010 and 2018, against 5.4% between 2000 and 2010. The sectoral performance of African economies depends critically on the stock and quality of infrastructure, directly as an essential input (for example, energy and transport) and indirectly by increasing total factor productivity. African economic integration, and the hoped-for emergence, can never be fully achieved with poor infrastructure, bo ...

Africa’s infrastructure investment gap has widened over time. Addressing the mismatch between developed countries’ “global savings glut” and African countries’ “investment dearth” might be a win-win. To facilitate that matching, some risk mitigation tools can be used. In this brief, we propose that by providing such risk mitigation tools, development institutions and governments can crowd-in private investment rather than crowd them out by providing full financing. This article was ...

Diversification is important because it is associated with economic growth and reduced volatility. Diversification of exports, which provide foreign exchange and enable imports of critical goods, services, and know-how, is crucial for developing countries. The question we address in this brief is how export diversification is affected by trade policies, including multilateral rules, regional trade agreements, and national measures. The record on diversification is poor across a larg ...

China’s economic records over the past four decades generated the intellectual curiosity of many foreign observers and researchers . The development pathway of Beijing is interesting to study as it proves that a country can take its destiny in its own hand. This paper tries to draw possible lessons from the Chinese development path to see if some of them could be adaptable to feed the development of the African countries. Introduction Forty years ago, China opened up its economy t ...

A well-functioning modern infrastructure is essential for social and economic development. It has the power to change the quality of life of populations as well as the prospects of businesses. Despite developing Asia’s remarkable economic performances since the 1980s, the region still faces important difficulties in delivering adequate infrastructure services. “Over 400 million Asians do not have electricity access; 300 million live without safe drinking water and 1.5 billion withou ...

Since coming to power on April 2018, Dr. Abiy seems to be unstoppable, making the world headlines on many occasions. He has embarked the country on an ambitious and transformative project; he has freed thousands of prisoners and established a Reconciliation Commission, has called on the privatization of state-owned enterprises and signed a stunning peace treaty with Eritrea. Furthermore, in a complete shift from the old paradigm of developmental state, the new PM outlined his renewe ...

This study was carried out within the framework of the Global Economic Governance Africa (GEGAfrica) funded by the UK Department for International Development. The GEGAfrica programme is a policy research and stakeholder engagement aimed at strengthening the influence of African coalitions at global economic governance forums and increase, inter alia, the visibility and the outreach of African views at the regional and worldwide levels. Policy Center for the New South was requested ...

Nowadays, links between development and security are widely recognized by many, just as they were during the development of the Marshall Plan. As mentioned in the United Nations "A More Secure World" report, threats to one are intrinsically a threat to all. Thus, 17 UN-agreed goals were agreed upon to help end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all by 2030, including goal 16 for "peaceful and inclusive societies". Last month, the UN’s inaugural Africa Dialogue S ...

If I were to synthesize the current situation of the Brazilian economy in one sentence, I would say: “it is suffering from a combination of ‘productivity anemia’1 and ‘public sector obesity2’". On the one hand, the mediocre performance of productivity in Brazil in recent decades has limited its GDP growth potential. On the other, the gluttony for expanding public spending has become increasingly incompatible with such limits in the potential expansion of GDP, particularly since ...

The agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a framework to create a free trade area across the region, bringing together the 55 members of the African Union into a continental market with a cumulative Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exceeding US$2.2 trillion and a total population of over one billion people. When concluded and successfully implemented, it will become the largest free trade area in the world in terms of membership, opening up significa ...

Latin America is up against a momentous year on multiple fronts. On one hand, game-changing national elections in six countries, including three of its largest – Brazil, Mexico and Colombia – are poised to reshape the political scenario in the region. In parallel, the economic agenda is front and center of countries’ efforts to overcome imbalances, implement reforms and accelerate growth. As a backdrop to all this, an important feminist movement is unfolding on the heels of a y ...