Opening Session : Opening Remarks by Co-Chairs

This chapter analyzes the emergence of disparities in income and development levels between Brazil’s main regions, in particular the gap that exists between the comparatively rich South and Southeast and the poorer North and West regions. Economic activity and the population are concentrated in a small part of the territory. Even within this reduced area, the geographical distribution is highly uneven. Besides concentration, regional inequalities are marked in the country in terms o ...

The Beijing Declaration “Toward and Even Stronger China-Africa Community with a Shared Future” - and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Beijing Action Plan (2019-2021), resulting from the last FOCAC held on September the 3rd and 4th 2018, in Beijing, showed the China-Africa cooperation will increase deeper in the near future, clearly demonstrating a new era for both China and Africa. FOCAC currently comprises China and 53 African countries.  China, slowly but surely, is ...

This blog is based on remarks delivered at the Think-Tank Summit in Buenos Aires on 18 September 2018 held under the G-20’s Argentine Presidency.  Africa has an enormous infrastructure gap that impedes its development. The Compact with Africa (CwA) is an international policy initiative sponsored under the German presidency of the G-20 in 2017 designed to bridge that gap. Intended to draw in the private sector in developing Africa’s infrastructure through a combination of Private-Pu ...

La ville de Kigali, au Rwanda, a accueilli du 5 au 8 septembre 2018 le forum de l’AGRA, devenant ainsi la capitale de l’agriculture africaine pendant ces quatre journées. Délégations gouvernementales, partenaires techniques et financiers, chercheurs, universitaires, investisseurs, producteurs, club de réflexion, entre autres, étaient en conclave pour faire l’état des lieux du secteur et mesurer les progrès accomplis sur la route de la transformation de l’agriculture africaine.  A t ...

If I were to synthesize the current situation of the Brazilian economy in one sentence, I would say: “it is suffering from a combination of ‘productivity anemia’1 and ‘public sector obesity2’". On the one hand, the mediocre performance of productivity in Brazil in recent decades has limited its GDP growth potential. On the other, the gluttony for expanding public spending has become increasingly incompatible with such limits in the potential expansion of GDP, particularly since the ...

The concern over global imbalances has become an effort to systematically reduce current account deficits and surpluses, feeding the protectionist narrative. However, global imbalances are driven predominantly by domestic policies and conditions, not external factors. We do not know enough about the determinants of current account balances to set out precise numerical norms. Policy-makers should pay more attention to establishing the conditions that make current account deficits and ...

As the world is shifting away from conventional fossil fuels towards renewable energy sources, the power industry is starting to invest more in sustainable clean energy installations rather than the traditional large-scale infrastructures, which rely mainly on oil and coal.  Besides its environmental benefits, this shift to renewables is very likely to benefit economic growth as well. A recent study of the International Renewable Energy Agency shows that, indeed, doubling the share ...

A decade ago, the world faced the prospect of the next Great Depression. The worst did not come to pass. In the 1930s, the unemployment went up to 25% in some countries. This time the average unemployment rate for advanced economies did increase sharply to over 8% in 2010 from 5 ½ % in 2007 but has since slowly returned to its level before crisis, as shown in Fig. 1 (International Jobs Report 2017). ...

The agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a framework to create a free trade area across the region, bringing together the 55 members of the African Union into a continental market with a cumulative Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exceeding US$2.2 trillion and a total population of over one billion people. When concluded and successfully implemented, it will become the largest free trade area in the world in terms of membership, opening up significa ...