Africa : how to enhance regional integration and economic growth ?

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 ...

This paper revisits Big Push industrialization theory in the context of open economies deeply integrated into global value chains (GVCs). While classical Big Push models emphasize demand complementarities and coordination failures in largely closed economies, many middle-income countries now industrialize through foreign-owned, import-intensive production networks. We develop an extended Big Push framework that incorporates GVC integration and import leakage, and show how these feat ...

Morocco has emerged as one of Africa's success stories, achieving significant progress in economic transformation and the green transition over the past 25 years. Continuing and deepening this transformation is essential to reach the country’s goal of becoming a high-income economy in the coming decades. Significant challenges include managing the risk of the middle-income trap, addressing demographic pressures, promoting inclusive growth, ensuring environmental sustainability, and ...

The European Union’s (EU) Global Gateway initiative, established to enhance global connectivity and sustainable infrastructure, offers a significant opportunity to align with Africa’s development goals under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). However, the challenge lies in whether the Global Gateway can effectively complement AfCFTA’s objectives of boosting intra-African trade and industrialization by addressing critical infrastructure gaps. This paper examines how th ...