Commodities & Energy

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 ...

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 ...

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Decarbonization is reconfiguring global relative prices. As clean energy, natural capital, and location-specific assets become dominant industrial inputs, the relative cost of producing low-carbon goods is increasingly determined by geography. Two systematic distortions explain why the expected reallocation of investment toward renewable-rich economies remains incomplete. First, industrial policy interventions, including subsidies, trade barriers, and certification systems, disconne ...

Gaspillage de l’eau et son mésusage : deux facteurs du stress hydriqueCe Policy Brief est consacré aux phénomènes de gaspillage et de mésusage de l’eau: deux impératifs de la lutte contre le stress hydrique, rappelés, avec insistance, par   Sa Majesté le Roi Mohammed VI dans son discours du 29 juillet 2024, à l’occasion de la célébration du 25ème anniversaire de son accession au Trône. La première partie de l’étude aborde la problématique générale du gaspillage e ...

Climate policy is increasingly reshaping the conditions under which firms participate in international markets. As some jurisdictions introduce carbon border adjustments, lifecycle emissions standards, and supply-chain traceability requirements, market access is starting to be made conditional on verifiable characteristics of production processes, such as carbon intensity, embedded emissions, and input sourcing, rather than solely on product characteristics or prices. This paper exa ...