DAY 2 - The 18th Annual Conference of the Arab Society for Economic Research

The late twentieth-century neoliberal experiment, imposed upon Latin America and Africa under the banner of the Washington Consensus, failed both economically and morally. Though it promised prosperity through deregulation, privatisation, and fiscal austerity, it delivered instead economic stagnation, rising inequality, and the systematic dismantling of the instruments of national development. This was not technocratic wisdom, but a project of ideological enforcement that subordinat ...

This paper aims to demonstrate how certain transformations in the international economy since the 1980s¾notably the globalization of firms and industries¾combined with a set of domestic challenges, disrupted the path of industrial and technological development that Brazil had pursued since the 1930s. In essence, growth strategies based on the scale of the domestic market ceased to be effective. The innovation and economic challenges the country now faces cannot be addressed without ...

This paper was originaly published on sciencedirect.com   This paper introduces a novel empirical approach, combining sigma convergence and sigma counterfactual statistics, to examine the dynamics of structural transformation in Morocco from 1990 to 2018. The findings reveal that Morocco experienced structural transformation driven by labor productivity reallocation across sectors during specific sub-periods (1991–1993, 1996–1997, and 1998–2003). However, this process ca ...

Last week marked my twenty-third consecutive week attending the World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings in Washington, DC. While I no longer participate in the official sessions, I continue to be invited to the many side conventions and debates that surround them. A key moment is always the release of the IMF's World Economic Outlook report. This year, it drew particular attention due to curiosity about how the institution would project the impacts of the tariff war initiated by Trump’s ...

This Opinion was originally published in Project Syndicate As the US-China rivalry intensifies, both powers are courting mineral-rich African countries in an effort to secure critical raw materials. Translating Africa's vast natural-resource wealth into lasting development requires an infrastructure-led strategy that delivers long-term value for local communities. ...

The author of this opinion, Danielle Alakija, is a 2024 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program. Once upon a time—or so the story went—the Global South was cast to the margins of the global development narrative. Assigned a supporting role in someone else’s story, it was exploited for its resources and subdued by the authoritative tone of external narrators. This image, painted in tones of crisis and dependency, continues to echo through textbooks and news cy ...

The author of this opinion, Isabela Carvalho, is a 2018 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program. In today’s interconnected world, knowledge plays a vital role in driving change and shaping solutions. Yet despite the rise of digital tools and global collaboration, persistent gaps in how knowledge is managed and shared continue to limit the Global South’s ability to fully harness its potential. Strengthening resilient knowledge ecosystems fosters inclusive ...