The Global Context: Major Forces Shaping Our World

The author is an alumnus of the 2018 Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders program Tech industries, despite leading the charge for change in many areas of modern life, have traditionally been one of the worst industries for gender equality. But now, it looks like technology itself could finally start to break down some of the barriers to entry and alter the socio-economic landscape beyond recognition. It could put women and under-represented minorities on the financial and technologi ...

The economic picture in South Africa is clear and well known: low economic growth, high unemployment rates, and constrained fiscal policy threatened by rating agencies. The causes of such situations are diverse and both internal and external. How can growth be boosted? The African continental free trade area offers a great opportunity to South Africa to take advantage of the continent’s more than one billion of potential consumers and build a new growth paradigm based on export (rat ...

Access to electricity is a key factor for the future of the African continent. Energy poverty and lack of universal access to electricity services are, in fact, remarkably hurting human progress in Africa. Today, sub-Saharan Africa hosts 14 percent of the world’s population but 60 percent of the world’s people without access to electricity: of the more than 1 billion people globally who had no access to electricity, around 600 million lived in the region. In these conditions, many A ...

China's push for Latin American consumers reflects changes back home. Chinese financing in Latin America is changing. After becoming a major source of capital flows to Latin America and the Caribbean over the past 15 years, a more diverse range of investors has surfaced, interested in channeling resources towards infrastructure, governments and state companies. The profile of the Chinese investment in the region tracks the evolution of China’s economy as it moves toward a higher r ...

A well-functioning modern infrastructure is essential for social and economic development. It has the power to change the quality of life of populations as well as the prospects of businesses. Despite developing Asia’s remarkable economic performances since the 1980s, the region still faces important difficulties in delivering adequate infrastructure services. “Over 400 million Asians do not have electricity access; 300 million live without safe drinking water and 1.5 billion withou ...

L’évaluation d’impact des projets et programmes de développement est un exercice qui est de plus en plus adopté dans les pays en développement notamment ceux d’Afrique subsaharienne. Entre autres facteurs explicatifs, il y a la rareté des ressources allouées au développement mais aussi la nécessité de mieux connaître les contraintes structurelles au développement. Saisissant l’occasion de la première conférence de West Africa Capacity building and Impact Evaluation Program (WACIE-3i ...

Dans son édition n°266, la revue scientifique Afrique Contemporaine consacre son Dossier à la question de l’industrialisation en Afrique. D’après la Rédaction de la publication, le choix de la thématique s’imposait d’autant plus que « la recomposition de l’ordre mondial repose la question de la place du continent à l’échelle planétaire, en l’occurrence sur le plan économique, social et environnemental tout à la fois. » Outre la coordination du Dossier, Dr. Karim Et Aynaoui, Préside ...

La transformation structurelle d’une économie demeure un point de passage nécessaire pour toute nation qui souhaite gravir les échelons du développement, cette transformation est souvent tributaire de la capacité d’une économie à s’ériger d’une société agraire de subsistance, dans son stade initial, vers une économie de productivité. Pour ce qui est du Maroc, le débat a pris de l’ampleur quant à la capacité des dynamiques actuelles à accélérer le rythme de l’activité économique au p ...

Without reforms, financial markets’ optimism may crumble – and bring the house down. Judging by the reaction of financial markets, the Brazilian economy started the year at high speed. The real is among the world’s best-performing currencies so far in 2019 and the main stock market index Ibovespa hit a string of record highs leading into last week, when it broke the 97,000-point mark. Future interest rates have fallen sharply.  Foreign investors are buying in as well. The premium ...

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson caught policymaker’s attention to the critical role of institutions for development. Their work gives too much emphasis to the prospects of revolution, however. A reading of the World Bank’s World Development Report of 2017 points to directions that all actors involved in the process, whether domestic or international, elite or non-elite, can take to improve societies. ...