Politics, Policies and Prospects of the MENA Region

Faut-il se réjouir et/ou se féliciter de l’émergence, enfin, d’un accord annoncé autour du conflit libyen, dans un monde dont on nous dit que tout y est volatile, incertain, complexe et ambigu ? Ou, faut-il raison garder et attendre pour juger de la résilience des institutions nées des accords et du vote de Genève, face aux assauts de la Volatilité, de l’Incertitude, de la Complexité et de l’Ambiguïté ? Si on adopte la dernière attitude, il serait plus réaliste de saluer l’effort de ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new vulnerabilities in social, infrastructure, and governance systems. In the first months of the pandemic, there was a genuine concern about the capacity of the Global South to contain the spread of the virus. African cities were particularly vulnerable, with some experts1, including the head of WHO2, predicting a catastrophe for the continent. Despite the structural and chronic challenges that African cities face, including informality, poverty, a ...

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19’s impact on Africa, focusing on the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, based on information available as of October 2020. We first identify the two key long-term issues of the SSA countries before the crisis: resource dependency and slow productivity growth. COVID-19 has hit SSA countries hard, causing human and economic destruction and wiping out economic progress from the last decade. Instead of growing at 2.9% in 2020, as ...

While the economic recovery around the world remains uneven, fragile, and unbalanced across sectors, financial markets are generally doing very well, thanks! In the United States, only half of the unemployment caused by the pandemic last year has been reversed, while stock markets continued to boom. Of course, this largely reflected the extraordinary support given by monetary authorities since March last year. As in the period after the 2007-08 global financial crisis, voices have ...