The African Continental Free Trade Area is the largest in the world. The World Bank sees it as a means of lifting 30 million people out of extreme poverty. But will it?
Improving the quality of education requires collaborative effort.
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Despite evidence that cash payments can help improve well-being, they have limitations as well, according to a development economist.
This week South Africa’s finance minister Tito Mboweni will deliver the country’s medium term budget review.
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Medium-term expenditure frameworks can be useful only when they are based on comprehensive medium-term development plans.
Dutchbar Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka was decimated by the 2004 tsunami. It fell under a newly created 200m buffer zone set up to protect people. But it destroyed fishing communities.
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There is a need to be alive to tensions between short- and long-term objectives, as well as the assumptions we hold around what we consider to be “better” and how to achieve it.
Boxing up humanitarian aid at UNICEF’s vast warehouse in October of 2020.
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South Africa’s National Treasury now proposes to reduce salaries. On the face of it this seems sensible. But the fundamental issue is the structure of the public service.
Central bank (in the background) can no longer perform its function of being the lender of last resort.
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Zimbabwe wants to issue a sovereign bond to raise $3.5 billion it has agreed to pay as compensation to white farmers, but the economic and political conditions aren’t conducive to such an issuance.
IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank group president David Malpass have offered debt relief to developing countries.
African countries should tread carefully over the debt relief offered by multilateral institutions and other lenders. It could prove very costly in the medium to long term.
People receiving food handouts in Lagos, Nigeria.
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A blanket solution to Africa’s debt burden risks costing African countries dearly in terms of access to international capital markets and the relatively lower cost of borrowing.
South African Reserve Bank Governor Lesetja Kganyago chairs the International Monetary Finance Committee.
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Small-scale fisheries buffer poverty and hunger in coastal countries.
A Pakistani man walks past a shop that was closed due to a recent strike in Peshawar, Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistani businesses went on strike in a nationwide protest against an increased sales tax, which opposition political parties said was imposed as part of the International Monetary Fund’s recent $6 billion bailout package for Islamabad.
(AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)
Abolishing the secretive World Bank Tribunal known as the ISDS won’t solve all of the problems of global economic governance. But it seems a very good place to start.
Professor of International Business Strategy & Emerging Markets at the University of Sussex Business School, and the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town