Fintech: Powering Inclusive Growth in Africa

The report will soon be available for purchase.   The 2024 Annual Report on the African Economy is dedicated to monetary and financial issues on the Continent. There are three reasons for this choice. African economies are exposed to macro-financial instabilities partly generated by global monetary and financial turbulence. The Continent’s currencies and financial systems are engaged in very different dynamics, where routine methods and daring, if not risky, practices coexist. ...

Depuis 2016, on assiste à une dynamique de création de fonds souverains africains. En 2023, on recense 21 pays et 24 fonds souverains. Sur la seule période 2016-23, celle de la deuxième vague, huit pays vont se doter d’un premier fonds souverain, et d’un deuxième, dans le cas du Maroc, en 2022. Cette étude rappelle tout d’abord l’historique d’une création qui commence, dès 1994, au Botswana, avec le Pula Fund, précisant pour chacun des 24 fonds leur date de création, leur ...

A 2023 United Nations progress report (UN, 2023) showed that, of the 169 targets that make up the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), only 15% are on track, and progress on many has either stalled or regressed. The Water-Energy-Food nexus approach has highlighted the utmost importance of understanding the interconnections between systems in order to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs. In this policy brief, we use the lessons learned from the water sector through a case study f ...

The debate on global value chains (GVCs) has emphasized countries’ contributions to value-added creation. From an intercountry perspective, a new body of research is addingto this debate by studying how subnational regions contribute to the indicators in specific countries. Proper assessment of economic contributions is essential for designing incentive policies. This paper analyzes the role played by the main trading partners of Moroccan regions in local value chains. We use input- ...

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched by Xi Jinping, passed its tenth anniversary in 2023. It has entered a third phase. The initiative added a label to China’s financing and construction of infrastructure abroad, which had already totaled more than $400 billion in the previous 10 years. In addition to the use of investment projects as part of Chinese ‘soft power’, the BRI has served to increase levels of usage of the country’s excess installed capacity. China’s economic re ...

This Chapter was originally published on Cape Town Chronicles   The history of debt in Africa is a long and painful one. It began in the 1980s, when the public finances of most developing countries deteriorated following two episodes of oil shocks, leading to a "lost decade" of low growth, increased poverty, and political instability. The recovery from the debt crisis only became possible following initiatives in favour of heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) and the Multilatera ...