debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
In March Kenya discovered oil. Even before it has proved to be commercial, and years before the money will flow, oil has already had an impact: by April public servants were demanding a large wage increase. Oil discoveries are psychological earthquakes: people imagine that good times have arrived. Such a narrative is the default option for [...]
During the nineteenth century London grew from a city of one million people to six million, a rate of expansion commensurate with the rapid urbanization currently underway in Africa. Further, per capita income in London in the mid-nineteenth century was roughly comparable with that in Africa today. But unlike modern Africa, nineteenth century London and [...]
Europe’s current troubles with the Euro should not detract from its success in liberating intra-regional trade: this is a model worth Africa emulating. The issue is timely since the African Union has a summit on trade and regional integration later this month. Regional integration is the ideal topic for the European Commission in its relations [...]
Holding the UN climate change conference in Durban is appropriate: climate change matters more to Africa than anywhere else. The African climate is set to become hotter and more volatile, exposing the region’s poor to heightened risk due to heavy dependence upon rain-fed agriculture. This alone would incline Africa to be at the forefront of [...]
The fate of the Euro will be determined not in Brussels, Frankfurt or Berlin, but in households and firms across Europe. In effect, the countries of the Eurozone have returned to the Gold Standard. The social costs, in terms of the unemployment and political change, of readjustment to the Gold Standard could prove to be [...]
Part I: The Role of Central Banks Many poor countries face their best opportunity for a generation: high prices and discoveries are generating substantial revenues from natural resource extraction. In Nigeria the same volume of oil exports is now worth dramatically more than a decade ago; in Ghana the recent oil discovery has just come [...]
I have just held an annual Roundtable for African central bankers. One of our themes was housing finance. Africa’s future is urban: cities facilitate productivity. But cities require huge investment, of which the largest component is the housing stock. In a developed economy such as Britain, the value of the housing stock constitutes over half [...]
Since the crisis, global investors have been searching for a new safe haven. In the core industrial OECD economies both the public and private sectors face dangerous structural challenges. Fiscal deficits present governments with the unpalatable choice between the risk of loss of investor confidence and retrenchments which may provoke renewed recession. Manufacturing is losing [...]
Europe’s reaction to the historic revolutions in North Africa has vacillated between exhilaration and fear. The natural instinct to celebrate and support democratization across the Mediterranean has been tempered by concerns that the crisis will spill onto European shores. A few leaders have invoked the post-World War II Marshall Plan as a model for large-scale [...]
New information technology has radically shifted the balance of power between governments and their citizens. This empowerment has worked through two distinct routes. One –exemplified by Wikileaks – is that citizens now have more direct access to information, so that news filtered through elite interpretation is becoming less influential. The other – exemplified by Tunisia [...]
It is actually quite extraordinary that the French revolutionaries around the year 1789 managed to come together and write a new constitution, which for mankind contained some decisive proclamations. They gathered in some resonant assembly halls in old Paris where it was almost impossible for the hearing impaired secretaries to hear the arguments that were [...]
On March 15th Commissioner Piebalgs convenes a meeting of experts on development (surely a good sign). Here I suggest five Commission actions which would help Africa. Through necessity my presentation will have to be brief. Nonetheless here is the menu. Improving natural resource extraction: Natural resource extraction will be the major African economic phenomenon of [...]
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