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South-South Cooperation in Economically Perilous Times

For 70+ years, development economists have been touting the idea that if lesser developed countries trade and invest collaboratively, it would serve as a pathway out of poverty. But today, the notion of so-called South-South cooperation is facing unprecedented challenges as ...

Grappling with African Success

This week saw the second China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo, held in Changsha, the capital of China’s Hunan province. As we’ve covered over the last few years, the city is rapidly emerging as a hub of Africa-China trade. It houses a new cocoa trading facility and is ...

6 Reasons Why Africa Likes China

A U.S. and European observers often wonder why African leaders have so thoroughly embraced engagement with China despite warnings of predatory lending, cyber espionage and so forth. In many policy circles, there's genuine confusion as to why the Western offer isn't more appealing and largely unable to ...

Michael Pettis: China’s Dramatic Curtailment in Overseas Lending Shows That Beijing is Learning the Same Lesson Today That Other Creditors Learned Years Ago

Acclaimed China economist, Peking University professor, and Carnegie Senior Fellow Michael Pettis posted a 7-part Twitter thread on Tuesday where he reflected on the new data published by the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University that shows a dramatic cutback in Chinese ...

Q&A: Adding Value to Agricultural Exports to China Will be Key to Ethiopia’s Post-COVID Recovery

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is among the greatest challenges facing the global community today. While Ethiopia has had an overall successful response to the pandemic with a low rate of infections and deaths, the country has been negatively affected by global trends. According to the World ...

Analysis from Cobus van Staden

BRICS Announces Numerous New Initiatives

The BRICS group wrapped up its two-day leaders’ summit in Rio de Janeiro on Monday. The summit’s final communique is a 16,000-word doorstop that covers numerous issues from economics to education.
The communique avoids any direct mention of the United States, and references to “unilateralism” and other coded criticism are also relatively scarce. Rather, the communique keeps the focus on the BRICS’ vision of the strengthening and reform of the global multilateral system ...

China Outlines Three Priorities For Its Ties With Africa in 2021

The Chinese government is laying out the key themes that will be discussed at the upcoming Forum on China-Africa Cooperation leaders' summit that is scheduled to be held sometime this year in Dakar, Senegal.  In an interview with Xinhua ahead of ...

Rise of Special Economic Zones in Africa: Can Agricultural Processing Be the Next SEZ Success Story?

By Sophia Kladaki and Jing Cai, Research Analysts at Development Reimagined “There is no one model of development” is one of the key principles, we, the team at Development Reimagined, try to champion when looking at key issues of economic growth ...

It’s Not All Gloomy

The last few weeks have been marked by a pervasive gloominess about Africa's future.  As Zambia was defaulting on its Eurobond debt, the G20 was praising itself effusively for coming up with a debt response unlikely ...

Why the “Professional Pessimists” Are Wrong About Africa’s Economic Future

Africa's economic landscape today looks bleak. Debt levels, unemployment rates and bankruptcies are all on the rise across much of the continent. And it doesn't look like there's going to be much help from the international community to weather the worst ...

W. Gyude Moore: Africa’s Position in the New “Cold War”

Former Liberian Minister of Public Works and now a Senior Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, W. Gyude Moore, wrote a compelling 10-part Twitter thread on why African countries are strenuously avoiding taking sides in the rapidly escalating dispute between the ...

The China Economy: What Lessons for Africa?

When African policymakers scan the globe in search of inspiration on how to structure their economies, that search often leads to Beijing. Not surprisingly, African leaders look at what China has done over the past 30 years ...

Should Africa Follow Asia's Path to Economic Prosperity?

Author John Akhile, Sr. argues in his new book "Unleashed" that if Asia's so-called 'Tiger economies' did it, so can Africa. By leveraging the continent’s agricultural potential, minerals, raw materials, and low-cost labor, Akhile thinks that using these resources Africans can ...