Economy

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 ...

Globally, public policies for youth face a twofold challenge: addressing structural socioeconomic challenges—such as unemployment, precariousness, and regional disparities—while accommodating a growing demand for effective civic participation. (ILO, 2023; United Nations, 2020) In Africa, this challenge takes on a unique dimension given the demographic weight of the youth population and the persistent fragility of local democracies. (AfDB, 2020; Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2023)Elections ...

À l'échelle mondiale, les politiques publiques de jeunesse sont confrontées à un double enjeu : répondre à des défis socio-économiques structurels; chômage, précarité, fractures territoriales, tout en intégrant une demande croissante de participation citoyenne effective. (OIT, 2023 ; Nations Unies, 2020) En Afrique, ce défi revêt une dimension singulière compte tenu du poids démographique de la jeunesse et des fragilités persistantes des démocraties locales. (BAD, 2020 ; Mo Ibrahim ...

Au Maroc, la problématique des jeunes NEETs (Ni en emploi, ni en études, ni en formation) constitue une urgence nationale, alimentée par 300 000 abandons scolaires annuels. Face à ce défi, le modèle de l'École de la Deuxième chance nouvelle génération (E2C-NG) a démontré sa pertinence en affichant un taux d'insertion exceptionnel de 81 %.Cependant, ce succès institutionnel repose intégralement sur un tissu associatif local aujourd'hui fragilisé. L'analyse inédite des donné ...

Global imbalances are back—and this time the risks look different. The 2008 financial crisis showed how persistent current-account deficits and surpluses between major economies can fuel financial instability and trigger sudden, severe reversals of capital flows. After almost two decades, many thought that episode had been resolved. It had not. New imbalances have built up, with a familiar cast: China, Germany, Japan, and oil exporters running large surpluses, and the United States ...

History devotes considerable attention to the rise and fall of great powers. Scholars have spent centuries analyzing why empires collapse, why nations decline, and why dominant states eventually lose their position. By comparison, relatively little attention has been devoted to a different question: what happens when a country succeeds beyond its own expectations? ...

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 ...

This essay argues that the current debate about the future of the international monetary system is not really about Gulf currencies, oil pricing, or de-dollarization in the narrow technical sense. It is about something deeper and more important: whether institutional trust can survive when geopolitical certainty is eroding.The Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman—increasingly exist in a world where the United States no longer looks ...

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 ...

Depuis le lancement de GPT-4 en mars 2023, un discours de plus en plus en vogue affirme que « si vous ne maîtrisez pas l'Intelligence artificielle (IA) vous serez dépassé ». On parle de prompt engineering comme s'il s'agissait d'une compétence ésotérique réservée à une élite technologique. Les réseaux sociaux professionnels regorgent de profils qui se présentent comme « experts en IA » après avoir suivi une formation de deux semaines. L'alarmisme fait vendre, et ...

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 ...

Le monde du travail est engagé dans un processus de mutation sans précédent. La quatrième révolution industrielle, portée par l’intelligence artificielle (IA) et la robotisation, a été le point de commencement d’une ère nouvelle où les repères économiques et sociaux se redéfinissent à une vitesse inédite. Ces technologies suscitent un engouement légitime et offrent des perspectives prometteuses, mais requièrent une vigilance accrue face aux incertitudes qui les entourent.Bien que, à ...

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 ...