Europe: Competitiveness, Macroeconomic Challenges and Global Competition

Diversification is important because it is associated with economic growth and reduced volatility. Diversification of exports, which provide foreign exchange and enable imports of critical goods, services, and know-how, is crucial for developing countries. The question we address in this brief is how export diversification is affected by trade policies, including multilateral rules, regional trade agreements, and national measures. The record on diversification is poor across a larg ...

Avant l'ère coloniale, l'émission d'argent en Afrique de l'Ouest dépendait de la traite des esclaves. Avec l'avènement du régime colonial, les pièces d'argent ont été importées puis progressivement imposées comme outil de coercition. La trajectoire postcoloniale a été différente pour les anciennes colonies britanniques et françaises. Alors que les premières ont retrouvé leur souveraineté monétaire, les secondes ont conservé une union monétaire sous l’égide de la France. La propositi ...

Latin American and Caribbean economies need help, but organizations like the IDB are also stretched thin. First appeared at Americas Quarterly With Latin America and the Caribbean potentially facing years of difficulties due to the pandemic and related economic crises, attention has shifted to what multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) might do to help. There’s no doubt they can play a crucial role in preventing another lost decade in the region. But ...

L’action publique urbaine dans le monde connait une métamorphose grâce à la montée en puissance du numérique dans la production et la gestion de la ville. Si le Maroc a franchi des étapes importantes dans la dématérialisation de certains services publics (impôts, cadastre, marchés publics, etc.), en revanche, d’autres secteurs peinent à suivre la même voie au moment où l’actuelle crise sanitaire de la Covid-19  vient rappeler l’urgence de la structuration de l’écosystème digital et ...

The “middle income trap” may well characterize the experience of Brazil and most of Latin America since the 1980s. Conversely, South Korea maintained its pace of evolution, reaching a high-income status. Such divergence of economic growth can be related to their distinctive performances of domestic accumulation of technological and organizational capabilities. Their different approaches to global value chains and trade globalization reinforced such discrepancy in domestic accumulati ...

The year 2020 is one of the most difficult years for the global automotive industry. The pandemic first appeared in a region of China known for its developed automotive sector. Initially, it was the South Asian manufacturers who first felt the impact of the shutdown in China before the pandemic shifted to Europe and the United States and before the disruption of value chains took on a global dimension. In Morocco, the sector has not remained immune to this turbulent context and its ...

We explore the effects of foreign aid on FDI in a large number of aid-recipient countries using data for the period 1985-2008 and focusing in particular on the impact of the interplay of aid and social cohesion. The preliminary results suggest that the independent effect of aid on FDI is negative in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and Latin America (LAC) and positive in other regions, while aid seems to crowd out FDI in countries with high levels of human capital. In addition, we find that ...

The transformation of the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) into a « Confederation of States » is sometimes considered, including by the Heads of State of the Community, as a natural next step in the process of deeper integration in West Africa. The purpose of this study is to explore its feasibility and relevance, based on the experience of other continents. A confederation of states can be defined as an association of sovereign states which, by means of an int ...

En dépit d’une diminution du contrôle des changes, le cours d’une devise continue de se jouer, jusqu’ici encore, en fonction de l’importance du poids considérable des relations financières qu’elle permet et facilite. Autant la monnaie américaine demeurait la devise-clé, en raison de la puissance tant économique que sécuritaire qu’elle reflète, autant l’Euro et le Yen n’en sont pas moins bien présents, également, sur les marchés que dans les réserves monétaires des divers pays. Certe ...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released, on August 4th, its ninth annual External Sector Report, where current account imbalances and asset-liability stocks of 30 systemically large economies are approached. This time the report went beyond looking the previous year and tried to anticipate what will be some of the impacts of the still on-going COVID-19 crisis. The report shows that the global economy entered the COVID-19 crisis with a configuration of external imbalances tha ...