Interview With Koffi Kouakou (APSACO 2019)

West African countries, on top of which is Côte d’Ivoire, represent the bulk of the world supply of cocoa beans. From the end of the nineteenth century to their independence, and to recent times, their histories have been marked by boom and bust cycles that were sometimes desynchronized from one country to another, especially for Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, due to differentiated political and economic backdrops. As for now, cocoa producers seem to be insulated from the rout which has h ...

Brazil is in a good position to serve as a bridge to Africa and to reignite more cooperation between both sides of the South Atlantic. Brazil has increased its presence in Africa in recent years in terms of trade, investment, development cooperation, and political alliances with the goal to secure a greater say for the global South in the new world order that has been under construction since the of the Cold War. This has been pursued through financial support and proactive economic ...

Rarement, la tendance sur les marchés mondiaux de matières premières et de commodités aura été aussi marquée qu’en 2015. Pratiquement tous les marchés se sont inscrits en baisse et celle-ci a été en général très forte à l’image de l’indice Cyclope-Rexecode en retrait en moyenne de 38 % en 2015 par rapport à 2014. Il est à la limite plus simple de citer les quelques produits pour lesquels le bilan de l’année a été positif : le cacao et de manière plus anecdotique le thé et l’huile d’ ...

Industrial policy is a controversial, even taboo, subject in policy circles. Yet it is widely practiced by advanced and developing countries alike2 . This note tries to make sense of this paradox. It argues that industrial policy can be a useful weapon in the development policy arsenal. However, the effectiveness of industrial policy is more circumscribed than many of its practitioners think, and there are significant risks associated with getting it wrong, especially in a poor gove ...

The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus has emerged over the last few years as an innovative and holistic platform for resource management and allocation. Unlike many other disciplines that make their way to the policy circle through academic debates, the nexus emerged from the global and policy business community as a platform to guide sustainability efforts. It is, with no doubt, that the nexus will find its way to the implementation of the sustainability development goals (SDGs), appro ...