Coronavirus brought a perfect storm to developing countries - Otaviano Canuto

The “middle-income trap” has become a broad designation trying to capture the many cases of developing countries that succeeded in evolving from low- to middle-levels of per capita income, but then appeared to stall, losing momentum along the route toward the higher income levels of advanced economies. Such a trap may well characterize the experience of most of Latin America since the 1980s, and in recent years middle-income countries elsewhere have expressed fears of following a si ...

The author is an alumnus of the 2018 Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders program Tech industries, despite leading the charge for change in many areas of modern life, have traditionally been one of the worst industries for gender equality. But now, it looks like technology itself could finally start to break down some of the barriers to entry and alter the socio-economic landscape beyond recognition. It could put women and under-represented minorities on the financial and technologi ...

Imagining world trade without the WTO/GATT system. It was after all, the case through recorded history until around 1950. But today’s economies are far more globally integrated than in the past, and information technologies which facilitate communication and coordination are clearly pointing to even more integration in the future. Under a no-WTO scenario, this brief formulates seven predictions. The danger to the WTO is clear and present, and it is on four fronts. First is the fail ...

The economic picture in South Africa is clear and well known: low economic growth, high unemployment rates, and constrained fiscal policy threatened by rating agencies. The causes of such situations are diverse and both internal and external. How can growth be boosted? The African continental free trade area offers a great opportunity to South Africa to take advantage of the continent’s more than one billion of potential consumers and build a new growth paradigm based on export (rat ...

Access to electricity is a key factor for the future of the African continent. Energy poverty and lack of universal access to electricity services are, in fact, remarkably hurting human progress in Africa. Today, sub-Saharan Africa hosts 14 percent of the world’s population but 60 percent of the world’s people without access to electricity: of the more than 1 billion people globally who had no access to electricity, around 600 million lived in the region. In these conditions, many A ...

Africa is experiencing a demographic boom, so as its population is expected to double by 2050 to reach 2.8 billion. The growth in Africa’s working-age population will be inevitable. The youth population will also grow to make of Africa the continent of youth ‘par excellence’, so as it will hold the largest number of young people in the globe. Source: UN DESA | United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2018 Against this outlook, economic growth is essential for Afric ...

Les cours des matières premières ont, une fois encore, été marqués par une importante volatilité en 2017 et 2018. Si de nombreux facteurs économiques permettent de l’expliquer, la raison politique fut également bien présente. Les Annual Report tensions commerciales entre la Chine et les États-Unis on Commodity et, plus globalement, la montée des incertitudes ont pesé Analytics and sur les perspectives macroéconomiques mondiales et sur Dynamics « le dynamisme des marchés ». Comptant ...

Next week, the 2019 Spring Meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank will take place in Washington, in this 75th year since the birth of the two institutions. Christine Lagarde, the IMF's managing director, speaking on Tuesday at the US Chamber of Commerce, offered an appetizer about the macroeconomic projections to be released. Last January, the IMF reduced its forecast of global economic growth to 3.5 percent in 2019 and 2020, lower rates as compared to ...

Can a G7, dominated by developing nations, provide the impulse to global governance as did the old G7? The answer is no. What a difference ten years can make. It was nearly ten years ago when, in a paper written with Benn Stancil and titled “The World Order in 2050,” he and I predicted that by 2030 — in 11 years from now — five of the seven largest economies of the world would be drawn from the ranks of developing countries as defined by the World Bank at the time of our writing. ...