03/4/2022
Photo credit: A wheat field in Russia. Credit: Ekaterina Sotova. Not one country has been spared the latest hike in food and fuel costs driven by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. It is normal practice to cite the IMF’s quarterly World Economic Outlook to illustrate changes in global prospects but today we …
Photo Credit: IMF Photo/Cory Hancock IMF-bashing takes many forms. The grounds for attack include the imposition of austerity in the 1980s in cohoots with the World Bank, a general intrusion into national sovereignty (whatever such means in the era of ...
13/8/2021
Photo Credit: USAID Nigeria We could join the clamour surrounding the cuts to the UK development aid budget but will instead highlight one area where technical assistance from advanced economies could be expanded. This is the nurturing of regulated pens...
08/7/2021
Image Credit: Monito – Money Transfer Comparison As we all began to understand the scale of the Covid-19 virus a little more than 12 months ago, the World Bank made the bold prediction that annual remittances would fall by about 20 per cent in aggre...
05/4/2021
Photo Credit: Mark Klotz – Rally against Kinder Morgan oil pipeline on Burnaby Mountain We have lived with Covid-19 for about 12 months, some of us a little longer. This creates an excuse to revisit the early obituaries for fossil fuels. The firs...
15/1/2021
Photo Credit: jlhervàs, Flickr As we inch towards a Biden presidency, we wonder how, if at all, the new occupant of the White House will leave his mark on Africa. Bill Clinton’s term brought the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Georg...
18/11/2020
Photo Credit: Rodrigo Amorim Carmen Reinhart, the chief economist at the World Bank, feels that emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) should step up their borrowing in the battle against the Covid-19 virus. “First you worry about fighting t...
19/10/2020
Image Credit: Yvonne, African market Negotiations over the sovereign debt of developing countries were much simpler at the time of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, launched in 1996 with the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative. G...
18/9/2020
Image Credit: African Market, Francisco Anzola In 2020 Africa faces its first recession in 25 years. Among the indicators pointing in this direction are remittances, which we touched upon last month although the early signs are better than widely feared...
19/8/2020