Sectorial policies and structural transformation

This Policy Paper analyses the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) through the critical lens of technological colonialism. It argues that the fusion of physical, digital, and biological technologies is not merely a technical phenomenon but a civilizational shift reshaping the foundations of global power. The article traces a historical continuum from previous industrial revolutions, demonstrating how patterns of inequality and extraction persist, now transposed into the digital realm ...

This report addresses the business environment in Brazil as one of the determinants responsible for the weak evolution of productivity in recent decades. After addressing this productivity performance, we define what constitutes the business environment, using as a reference the three ways in which the World Bank has been addressing the subject.Next, we highlight how the business environment affects productivity in a country. Finally, we review some recent reforms in the country's b ...

La modélisation classique de la croissance repose sur des outils – notamment la fonction de production agrégée et la comptabilité de la croissance – dont les incohérences logiques et les ambiguïtés épistémologiques sont connues depuis la Controverse de Cambridge et les travaux d’Anwar Shaikh. Pourtant, ces failles continuent d’alimenter des raisonnements fallacieux dans le débat économique et les discours institutionnels. Cet article montre que la nature tautologique de ces outils n ...

Morocco has emerged as one of Africa's success stories, achieving significant progress in economic transformation and the green transition over the past 25 years. Continuing and deepening this transformation is essential to reach the country’s goal of becoming a high-income economy in the coming decades. Significant challenges include managing the risk of the middle-income trap, addressing demographic pressures, promoting inclusive growth, ensuring environmental sustainability, and ...

This blog was originaly published on orfonline.org. The maritime cities of the 21st century are not merely legacies of the industrial age. Rather, they are becoming platforms of global connectivity and engines of economic transformation. As global trade shifts toward digital platforms and multimodal logistics, the traditional harbour is transforming into a 'Blue City' - a modern coastal centre where trade finance, service industries, and skilled workers are considered as k ...

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States has undergone massive deindustrialization in recent decades, with the country's manufacturing sector supposedly withering as it lost ground to China. This narrative has fueled debates about industrial policy, economic nationalism, and the reshoring of manufacturing production. But what if this story is only partially true? What if, instead of disappearing, American industry simply changed its address?  ...

Amidst intense geopolitical competition, efforts to develop tokenized monetary units—tradable on programmable platforms such as blockchains—have added a new dimension to the debate about the role of a global payment and reserve currency. Tokenized monetary units are expected to greatly improve the efficiency of payment transactions in terms of their speed and cost, especially cross-border transactions. They could also meet emerging demand for technologically enabled features such as ...

The author of this opinion, Imane Lahlou, is a 2014 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program.Seeing the Script“What if you heard the same idea, delivered in the same words by two people, one from Sweden, the other from Senegal. Would it land the same? Whose room do you think would fill up first if both spoke on the same topic, for the same ticket price?”These were the opening questions of a charged conversation with two dear friends, as we began naming the ...

This Blog was originally published on t20southafrica.org The G20 should address reform challenges during South Africa's presidency, as ongoing geopolitical tensions obstruct global cooperation and complicate efforts to revamp the international financial architecture. ...

Available soon on livremoi. The 2025 edition of the African Economic Report continues in the spirit of previous versions. It presents a broad overview of the continent’s economic evolution and offers insights into Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world. In other words, it explores how Africa navigates the effects of global fragmentation within its regional spaces while pursuing its ambition of continental integration. ...

Developing countries have few options to deal with the ongoing tariff war amid unpredictable shifts in global supply chains. However, regional economic integration offers a strategic path of development in these uncertain and challenging times. Helped by geographical proximity and cultural familiarity, countries in a region can benefit greatly from promoting trade with one another, reaping the benefits of comparative advantages and economies of scale—if they are able to establish a ...

La stabilité apparente des taux directeurs de la BCEAO (Banque centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest) masque une réalité bien plus préoccupante : un resserrement monétaire non déclaré dans la zone UEMOA (Union économique et monétaire ouest-africaine) et une rareté accrue de la liquidité qui frappe tout le système. Nous proposons une analyse en profondeur des mécanismes de cette crise bancaire latente, ses manifestations concrètes sur le tissu économique et ses implications pour ...

Dans un contexte devenu plus incertain et plus compliqué à la suite des décisions de la nouvelle administration américaine, les impératifs de la lutte contre le changement climatique et de la transition énergétique et écologique demeurent.Les banques centrales peuvent et doivent apporter leur contribution à cette transition, en « verdissant », dans une proportion à définir, la politique monétaire qu’elles mènent. Concrètement, cela veut dire compléter la palette des object ...

This Paper was originally published on springer.com This study investigates the impact of female agricultural cooperatives on women’s empowerment in Morocco, with a focus on the rural Marrakech-Safi region. The research evaluates the effectiveness of these cooperatives in enhancing women’s empowerment through economic opportunities, participatory governance, and leadership roles. The Global Empowerment Index (GEI) was adopted to measure empowerment across five key dimensions: p ...

Les politiques industrielles semblent marquer leur retour, aussi bien dans les grandes puissances économiques que dans les pays émergents et en voie de développement, notamment après la pandémie de la Covid-19, l’accroissement des tensions géopolitiques et commerciales et les effets du changement climatique.L’Afrique n’est pas en reste, surtout qu’une prise de conscience des enjeux liés à la position continentale dans un monde multipolaire est en train de naître. Même au niveau de l ...

In 2000, The Economist dismissed Africa as the “Hopeless Continent”—a label reflecting a broader system of marginalization rooted in colonial legacy and post-Cold War neglect. This essay offers a realist reappraisal, arguing that Africa’s growing strategic relevance is not the result of benevolence, but of structural necessity.Amid a fracturing global order and the rise of transactional geopolitics under Trump 2.0’s Bessent Doctrine, Africa has become indispensable: rich in critical ...

This paper analyses the stabilization experience in the MENA region, focusing on Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan over the past century. It seeks to answer the question: To what extent have these countries succeeded in achieving resilience to shocks and stresses? Key policy elements included significant fiscal adjustments—varying in scale across countries—and exchange rate developments supported by monetary policies aimed at combating inflationary pressures. The outcomes involved ...

This paper aims to demonstrate how certain transformations in the international economy since the 1980s¾notably the globalization of firms and industries¾combined with a set of domestic challenges, disrupted the path of industrial and technological development that Brazil had pursued since the 1930s. In essence, growth strategies based on the scale of the domestic market ceased to be effective. The innovation and economic challenges the country now faces cannot be addressed without ...

This paper was originaly published on sciencedirect.com   This paper introduces a novel empirical approach, combining sigma convergence and sigma counterfactual statistics, to examine the dynamics of structural transformation in Morocco from 1990 to 2018. The findings reveal that Morocco experienced structural transformation driven by labor productivity reallocation across sectors during specific sub-periods (1991–1993, 1996–1997, and 1998–2003). However, this process ca ...