Trade

The renewed instability in the Middle East has exposed Africa's continued vulnerability to external energy shocks. Shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz, the maritime chokepoint through which roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG supplies transit, have once again demonstrated that African fuel security remains highly dependent on geopolitical developments beyond the continent. While many African economies have traditionally relied on refined petroleum imports from Gulf ...

Les crises récentes au Moyen-Orient, notamment les attaques ciblant les navires commerciaux en mer Rouge et les tensions autour du détroit d'Ormuz, ont mis en évidence la vulnérabilité des principaux corridors stratégiques du commerce mondial. Plus qu'un bouleversement de l'organisation des échanges, elles accélèrent une transformation déjà engagée, fondée sur la recherche de chaînes de connectivité plus résilientes, la diversification des itinéraires commerciaux et le développement ...

La géographie mondiale des hydrocarbures n'est évidemment pas figée. De nouveaux producteurs de pétrole et/ou de gaz naturel apparaissent suite à des découvertes, le plus souvent réalisées par des compagnies pétrolières internationales. On pense notamment au Mozambique, qui produit et exporte du gaz naturel liquéfié (GNL) depuis la fin 2022, au Sénégal, qui est un producteur de pétrole offshore depuis la mi-2024, et au Sénégal et à la Mauritanie, qui sont devenus conjointement expor ...

This paper addresses the persistent challenge of resource dependence in the world's poorest countries, focusing on the ten poorest African nations where natural- resource rents average 14% of income. It argues that four decades of conventional policy advice, which treated resource dependence primarily as a revenue management problem, have failed to help these countries. While stabilization funds and permanent-income frameworks aim to smooth consumption, they do not answer the fundam ...

This policy paper explores how China’s economic development model—rooted in pragmatism, long-term planning, and civilizational renewal—has become its most compelling soft power asset, particularly in the eyes of the Global South. While critically engaging with Joseph Nye’s original conception of soft power as a primarily cultural and normative force, the paper argues that China’s ability to transform itself from an impoverished postimperial state into the world’s largest trading nat ...

This Opinion was originally published in Project Syndicate Data from a period in which both China and India pursued deliberate industrial policies show that neither country's development route is accessible to other countries. At best, their experience can alert policymakers to structural limitations and coordination problems that will require their own homegrown solutions.RABAT—What is the most reliable development path for an increasingly fragmented global economy? China ...

En un siècle, le cours de l’once d’or est passé de 20 dollars à 5 300 dollars au premier trimestre 2026. Cette étude, consacrée à l’analyse de cette envolée, comporte deux parties.La première privilégie une approche historique. Elle retrace tout d’abord le changement de statut du précieux métal jaune, monétisable jusqu’en 1971 puis démonétisé par la suite. Elle rappelle ensuite que cette évolution, loin d’être linéaire, est ponctuée de phases de forte hausse, de stagnation et d ...

The term “K-shaped recovery” was introduced to describe the economic recovery from the recession triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. It refers to the uneven and divergent growth pattern between leading industries or sectors (the upper arm of the letter K—mainly the high-technology sector) and laggards, or the rest of the economy (the lower arm—the traditional industries). Since then the term has become popular in portraying divergent growth patterns within and between countries, esp ...

Thanks to the AI investment boom, the U.S. economy has performed well at the macroeconomic level. However, it is on an unsustainable fiscal and debt path. Mr. Trump’s fiscal policy in his second term has aggravated this trajectory. In turn, Mr. Trump’s tariff-based trade policy has failed to address what he sees as U.S. economic problems associated with the trade balance. Besides explaining why this has been the case, and what its implications are for the U.S. economy and the r ...

This paper provides a structural assessment of India’s services-led development trajectory, and its integration into global value chains (GVCs) between 2012 and 2022. Applying an analytical framework that categorizes services into knowledge (KS), enabling (ES), and local (LS) sectors, the study utilizes sixteen OECD indicators to move beyond the narrative of India as a ‘services champion’ and reveal a more complex economic reality. The analysis identifies three central structur ...

On “marinetraffic.com”, thousands of triangles fill a map of the world’s ports and oceans, each representing the active location and destination of a ship, reported the “McGill International Review” (April 16, 2026) adding,” suspicious tankers are plentiful among them.” One of these vessels, marked by a red triangle, appears, zoomed, as “Monique”, a twenty-year-old vessel, aka Tokyo, Phuket and Elysia. Its old age and the frequent name change, suspects reporter Julnar Alzuki, “indic ...

Available soon on livremoi. The 2026 edition of the Annual Report on the African Economy examines the issue of the valorization of Africa’s natural resources, particularly its mineral wealth. While the continent holds some of the world’s largest known reserves of a wide range of minerals and metals, the objective is not merely to catalogue these resources, but rather to explore the conditions under which natural resource endowments can be transformed into drivers of Africa’s in ...

For much of the post-war period, the Global South was framed as an object of history, defined by dependency, constrained by structural asymmetries, and confined to the margins of global decision-making. That narrative, once empirically grounded, is now no longer adequate. A profound yet uneven transformation is underway. The Global South is no longer only reacting; it is increasingly shaping rules, institutions, and narratives.This Policy Brief argues that the Global South is thus t ...

Cet essai analyse la guerre Iran–États-Unis–Israël de 2026 comme un révélateur de la transformation profonde de l’ordre international. À travers le prisme du droit de la mer, du détroit d’Ormuz, des alliances fragmentées, des câbles sous-marins et des flux énergétiques, il montre que le pouvoir mondial se déplace progressivement du contrôle des territoires vers la maîtrise des infrastructures de circulation. Loin de disparaître, la mondialisation entre dans une phase de connectivité ...

Este Policy Paper también ha sido publicado en inglés y francés por Le Grand Continent La economía marroquí constituye un caso ilustrativo entre las economías de renta media, en un contexto marcado por una creciente fragmentación del entorno internacional, un crecimiento mundial anémico y una desaceleración de la convergencia. Desde 2022, su trayectoria se caracteriza por una relativa solidez, con un crecimiento superior a la media de las economías de la misma categoría. Superi ...

Ce Policy Paper a également été publiée en anglais et en espagnol par Le Grand Continent Le Maroc offre un exemple éclairant parmi les pays à revenu intermédiaire, dans un contexte marqué par une fragmentation croissante de l’environnement international, une croissance mondiale atone et un ralentissement de la convergence. Depuis 2022, sa trajectoire se distingue par une certaine robustesse, avec un rythme d’expansion supérieur à celui des autres économies de même catégorie. Dé ...

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 today remains far from food secure. Chronic malnutrition, widespread anemia among women of childbearing age, stunting and wasting among young children, pervasive underemployment in both rural and urban areas, and a youth bulge frustrated by high unemployment are key features of a continent that is seriously off track with respect to the SDG deadline: only 6% of SDGs have been implemented (Mo Ibrahim Forum, 2025).Despite this dismal progress, Africa can still achieve “The Afri ...

L’Afrique atlantique émerge aujourd’hui comme un espace de réflexion stratégique majeur. Longtemps envisagée sous l’angle de sa fragmentation ou de sa marginalité relative dans les grands récits géopolitiques, cette façade maritime tend désormais à être appréhendée comme un ensemble en devenir, structuré par des dynamiques géopolitiques, économiques et sécuritaires de plus en plus intenses. C’est dans cette perspective qu’a été initié le Africa Maritime Symposium (AMS), dont la ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This Paper was originally published on tandfonline.com This paper examines how reductions in transportation costs reshape regional economic and environmental outcomes in Morocco. We simulate a reduction in delivered (purchasers’) costs via a transport-margin efficiency improvement – implemented as a margin-saving technical change in the transport sector – within a province-level Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) framework. Simulating a 1% decline in transport costs, ...

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that Africa loses as much as USD 60 billion each year in illicit financial flows (IFFs). Undoubtedly, the IFFs strip substantial amounts of resources from African countries, and the immediate impact is a reduction in national expenditure and investment. This translates into inadequate public services, including hospitals, schools, national security, and transport infrastructure. It also contributes t ...