Chinese mining investments in Africa

The pandemic is accelerating history, in the sense that it is leading to the speeding up of some recent trends. In the case of globalization, the pandemic will not reverse it, but it will reshape it. Here we take a bird’s eye view of global trade during the pandemic, relate it to previous trends, and guess how global value chain managers and government trade policymakers are likely to react. A Bird’s Eye View of Global Trade during the Pandemic World trade took a deep dive during ...

Our Senior Fellow Rabi Mohtar has co-authored with our economist, Fatima Ezzahra Mengoub along other researchers a research paper entitled « A Water-Energy-Food Nexus approach for conducting trade-off analysis: Morocco’s phosphate industry in the Khouribga region » in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Journal (Volume 24, Issue 10). The study objective was to develop and use the Water-Energy-Food Nexus Phosphate (WEF-P) Tool to evaluate the impact of Morocco’s phosphate industry ...

On assiste, ces derniers mois, à un rebond des cours de l'or, le portant vers de nouveaux sommets. L'analyse des cours de ce précieux métal depuis deux siècles montre une grande stabilité jusqu'en 1971, date de l'abandon de la convertibilité or /dollar par les Etats-Unis, mais aussi de son mouvement erratique depuis cette date. Soumise aux lois du marché, cette matière première voit son cours dépendre essentiellement de la demande. Evolution qui confirme cet actif comme valeur refug ...

Our senior Fellow, Henri Louis Védie has published in “Politique internationale” magazine, N 167, autumn 2020, an article entitled "Sovereign wealth funds, major actors in the world economy" ...

The coronavirus epidemic is weakening even further the economies of the Gulf of Guinea, which have already been particularly undermined by an oil sector that has been in crisis for several years. The rapid fall in oil prices will once again put a strain on systems that fail to reinvent and diversify themselves in order to protect themselves from the shortcomings often seen in windfall economies. In addition to the economic impact, it is likely to see the potential security and polit ...

Les pays africains riches en pétrole sont confrontés, à la fois au choc de la pandémie de Covid-19 et à l’effondrement des prix du pétrole, ce qui les expose à de nombreuses vulnérabilités. La situation est d’autant plus alarmante, vu que la plupart de ces pays ne se sont pas encore remis du choc pétrolier de 2014. Cette nouvelle crise aggrave, donc, une situation économique déjà difficile. Les termes de l’échange de ces pays risquent, ainsi, de se détériorer, entraînant une réducti ...

This paper aims at evaluating the virtual water content in trade in an intra-country perspective and discussing potential tradeoffs between the use of natural resources and value added creation. We develop a trade-based index that reveals the relative water use intensities associated with specific interregional and international trade flows. The index is calculated considering the measures of water and value added embedded in trade flows associated with each regional origin-destinat ...

L'épidémie de coronavirus vient encore davantage affaiblir les économies du golfe de Guinée déjà particulièrement fragilisées par un secteur pétrolier localement en crise depuis plusieurs années. La rapide baisse des cours va mettre à nouveau à rude épreuve des systèmes qui ne parviennent pas à se réinventer et à se diversifier afin de se prémunir des travers souvent constatés au sein des Etats rentiers. Outre l'impact économique, ce sont également les potentielles difficultés d'ord ...

West Africa has always played an essential role in African geopolitics. Although less thought of than north, south and east Africa, because of their envied strategic openings into both the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean, West African countries are transforming themselves into a major African hub. For Britain, the completion of Brexit heralds a new era in its contemporary history. In this framework, West Africa is a crucial region for the United Kingdom’s long-term strategic goal ...