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

The African Union Summit of February 2026 instructed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Council of Ministers to negotiate a Protocol on Industrial Policy and Development. This work, handled without adequate preparation, is likely to reproduce the weaknesses it is meant to remedy. This paper is a conceptual mapping exercise, written to raise the preparatory questions before drafting begins, rather than to prescribe outcomes.It proceeds in five sections:1. It works towar ...

The Brazilian context involving a clean-electricity base, a more balanced lobbying landscape, and mounting climate and social pressure, makes it more difficult for the kind of abrupt and unrestrained energy policy swing seen in Colombia. The trend in Brazil tends to be more economically viable for renewables. However, these structural conditions by themselves will not guarantee the success of the transition. Fruition will depend on whether policymakers use this window to prepare for ...

Various competing cross-border payment networks have become vehicles for geopolitical competition. As tensions have risen, many countries want to secure access to cross-border payment systems by joining with like-minded countries to form interoperable networks, either via tokenization or Instant Payment Systems (IPSs). Three major projects are under development, serving the strategic interests of the US, China and the Rest of the World—corresponding to the three trading spheres taki ...

Le déclenchement de la Guerre en Iran et le blocage du détroit d’Ormuz ont eu des conséquences majeures sur un grand nombre de marchés mondiaux de matières premières. Si l’attention médiatique s’est logiquement portée sur le pétrole et le gaz naturel, ainsi que sur l’aluminium, en raison de la forte dépendance de l’offre de ce métal aux prix de l’énergie, le soufre, comme l’hélium, l’éthylène, le propylène ou l’urée, a également été pris dans les rets de ce conflit. Loin d’être une ...

The outbreak of the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have had major consequences for a large number of global commodity markets. While media attention has understandably focused on oil and natural gas, as well as on aluminum – owing to the strong dependence of that metal’s supply on energy prices – sulfur, like helium, ethylene, propylene, or urea, has also been caught up in the fallout of this conflict. Far from being a marginal commodity, it is essential to the ...

Le marché du travail marocain connaît, depuis les années 2000, une expansion continue de la scolarisation qui ne s'est pas accompagnée d'une transformation équivalente de la structure productive de l'économie, ouvrant la voie à des situations d'inadéquation verticale entre le niveau de formation des actifs occupés et les exigences des emplois qu'ils occupent. La présente étude analyse les déterminants du déclassement (sur-éducation) et du surclassement (sous- éducation) à partir des ...

Since the early 2000s, the Moroccan labour market has experienced continuous educational expansion that has not been matched by an equivalent transformation of the economy's productive structure, giving rise to situations of vertical mismatch between employed workers' education levels and the requirements of the jobs they hold. This study analyzes the determinants of overeducation and undereducation using anonymized microdata from the 2014 General Population and Housing Census (RGPH ...