Fireside Chat : Résister à la fragmentation de l'économie mondiale

The world economy has gone through several systems to determine a value between country’s currencies. After the Second World War and the so-called gold standards, major world economies engaged into a system of fixed exchange rate of currencies against the dollar and, the whole system was backed by the value of USD against gold. After the end of that mechanism known as the Bretton Wood system in the 1970s, major world economies decided to liberalize the system of international exchan ...

The world trading system has been remarkably successful in many respects but is presently under tremendous strain. The causes are deep-seated and require a strategic response. The future of the system depends critically on reinvigorating the WTO and policy change in the largest trading nations. Important measures are required to sustain the multilateral trading system, and urgent action is needed to avoid a scenario where the system fragments. The worst scenarios will disrupt global ...

On the eve of Britain’s exit from the European Union, the country is redefining its international approach. The United Kingdom has already taken action by becoming involved in new economic commitments, new trade agreements in Commonwealth countries but also from a diplomatic point of view in West Africa. While development aid remains a focal point of its intervention in Africa, it risks being undermined by the Brexit and its economic consequences. However, the United Kingdom is now ...

The trade tensions between the United States and China will cause only minor immediate damage to their giant economies. However, tariffs have important and diverse effects on individual sectors and cause heightened uncertainty. The main adverse effects on Sub-Saharan Africa will therefore be through global investor confidence, economic growth and commodity prices, and these effects could be severe if the dispute escalates further and endangers the rules-based trading system. The tra ...

Throughout my last 15 years working in multilateral institutions, many times around the world I was asked to speak about the success of poverty reduction in Brazil during the new millennium. Last week, someone who was on such an occasion in October 2013 in Nairobi asked me what my numbers had become after these recent years of precarious macroeconomic performance and high unemployment in the country. I replied that they have changed ... in part! Indeed, the fact that, even without ...

Sur quelles contraintes faut-il anticiper lorsqu’on évoque la croissance de l’Afrique? Comment guider les décideurs politiques dans les priorités à définir pour piloter l’économie et arriver à bon port dans le monde qui vient? Le séminaire organisé le 11 avril à Paris par le PCNS et le Centre de développement de l’OCDE a apporté des éléments de réponse. La discussion s’est ouverte en prenant appui sur le rapport de référence publié en 2018 par l’Union africaine et l’OCDE sur les “D ...

This policy brief (PB), prepared for the G-20 Working Group on Trade, aims to provide decision-makers with a succinct review of the state of the trading system, to point to likely scenarios, and to serve as a background to or reference for the other six PBs prepared by the T20 Task Force on Trade, Investment and Globalization. The brief argues that the world trading system has been remarkably successful in many respects but that the present strain reflects causes which are deep-seat ...