Session 7: The New Trilemma of Macroeconomic Policy: Future Policy Responses

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on Africa, focusing on the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, based on information available as of October 2020. We first identify the two key long-term issues of the SSA countries before the crisis: resource dependency and slow productivity growth. COVID-19 has hit SSA countries hard, causing human and economic destruction and wiping out economic progress from the last decade. Instead of growing at 2.9% in 2020, as ...

While the economic recovery around the world remains uneven, fragile, and unbalanced across sectors, financial markets are generally doing very well, thanks! In the United States, only half of the unemployment caused by the pandemic last year has been reversed, while stock markets continued to boom. Of course, this largely reflected the extraordinary support given by monetary authorities since March last year. As in the period after the 2007-08 global financial crisis, voices have ...

Regional integration in Africa is seen as a priority by many of the continent’s policymakers and economic stakeholders. With all Africa now signed up to the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), the challenge now is to implement a continental market for goods and services and establish the foundations of a continental customs union. Many on the continent see the AfCFTA as an investment, economic-diversification, and job-creation blueprint that will shape the future of A ...

This article was originally published on IMF blog.  The road to recovery for the Middle East and Central Asia region will hinge on containment measures, access to and distribution of vaccines, the scope of policies to support growth, and measures to mitigate economic scarring from the pandemic. The virus’s second wave, which began in September, hurt many countries in the region, where infection and death rates far surpassed those seen during the first wave . Most countries resumed ...

L’entrée en vigueur de l’accord instituant la Zone de libre-échange continentale africaine (ZLECAF) s’inscrit dans la continuité des aspirations anciennes pour intégrer les marchés africains et faire de cette intégration un vecteur de prospérité et de développement. Il s’agit, en effet, d’une étape dont la traversée est inévitable en vue d’aboutir aux aspirations annoncées par l’Agenda 2063. C’est une étape qui concrétise, dans sa première phase, un engagement en faveur de la libre ...