Opening Session : Opening Remarks by Co-Chairs

Regional economic integration across the world accelerates growth and development by bringing a wide array of benefits associated with enhanced political cooperation, increased intra-regional trade, and job creation. Regions that are more integrated have proven to grow faster and have shown greater resilience in times of global economic downturns. As the world economy struggles to return to the high growth levels of a decade ago, stimulating internal and regional growth has become t ...

Trade integration is a prerequisite for the success of any economic integration project. The factors hindering trade integration therefore constitute a bottleneck to the economic integration project of the countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is an effective means of coping with the substantial expansion of sub-regional food demand. The aim of this paper is to highlight the factors that constrain trade flows and increase the cost of trade in the ...

En un tiers de siècle, la Chine, pays en développement, est devenue une économie émergente, puis une puissance économique mondiale. Il s’agit là du principal évènement économique du début du XXIe siècle. Cet évènement interpelle le Maroc, le Maghreb, l’Afrique et l’espace sudméditerranéen, parce qu’il est porteur d’un second dépassement historique, provenant, cette fois, non pas de l’Occident, mais de la Chine lointaine pourtant tellement présente dans notre quotidien. Répondre à c ...

The government of Argentina’s new president, Mauricio Macri, has many challenges ahead. In the initial 10 months of his government, he has devalued the currency, lifted significant trade and capital barriers, and launched conversations with international investors and creditors, and has changed international perceptions toward Argentina. Macri’s election immediately generated a positive reaction from the private sector toward the new government. However, indicators for 2016 show a w ...

In September 2015, Heads of State met at the United Nations General Assembly to announce the end of the term of “Millennium Development Goals” (MDGs) and commit to a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 17 SDGs were written by disciplinary teams, and as they are formulated now, they recognize the interlinkages between well-being, economic prosperity and a healthy environment. The SDGs include a wide spectrum of topics and issues: food security, poverty, gender inequa ...

U.S. assets reacted in a see-saw fashion to Donald Trump’s victory. Stock futures first dove deeply before climbing up to strong gains as investors developed a view on what kind of economic policy president-elect Trump is likely to pursue. They seem to be pricing in an expectation of higher growth and inflation, as well as an earlier Federal Reserve exit from ultra-low interest rates and from holding U$ 4.45 trillion of Treasury bonds. Shock waves hit international financial market ...

Despite the gloomy tone of much discussion at the just-concluded IMF and World Bank annual meetings, the global economy is not in as bad shape as many think. The concerns about “secular stagnation” in advanced countries are also overplayed, and nor are developing countries directly exposed to such risks. By contrast, the pessimism about the prospects for MENA are unfortunately largely justified. Most importantly, at the global and at the MENA level the biggest concerns are not econo ...

Discussions around large current account imbalances among systemically relevant economies as a threat to the stability of the global economy faded out in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. More recently, some signs of a possible resurgence of rising imbalances have brought back attention to the issue. We argue here that, while not a threat to global financial stability, the resurgence of these imbalances reveals a sub-par performance of the global economy in terms of fore ...

Brazil’s GDP contraction since mid-2014 has multiple non-fiscal roots - Canuto (2016a; 2014) – but it has morphed into an unsustainable fiscal trajectory (Canuto, 2016b). Dealing with the latter has become a precondition for full economic recovery and the Brazilian government has submitted to Congress a constitutional amendment bill mandating a public spending cap for the next 20 years. This piece considers how the Brazilian landscape evolved toward such a precipice and why addition ...

We develop an interregional computable general equilibrium model to help assess the ex ante impact of transportation infrastructure policies in Egypt. The model is integrated with a GIS network. We illustrate the analytical capabilities of the model by looking at the domestic integration of the country. Improvements of transportation costs among Egyptian governorates and of their links to the broader world economy are considered in stylized simulations. The results provide quantitat ...