Top Priorities for Africa in 2018 besides China ?

Another highly recommend report on Africa, this time from Brookings- Foresight Africa: Top priorities for the continent in 2018.

We recommend the chapters 4 and 5, focusing on structural transformation and digital potential respectively. Of the viewpoints we recommend the ones by Dr. Shanta Devrajan, former Chief Economist for Africa, Celestin Monga (The global dividends on Africa’s industrialization) and by David Dollar (African Economies and Global value chains)

For Discussion:

1. Shanta Deverjan proposes an innovative suggestion on a perennial problem in Africa’s oil rich economies and address it through universal basic income. How effective do you think it would be?

2. How can China assist further in African transformation;

Globally, trade policy has an important role to play. Escalating tariffs in Asia for higher-stage processing of commodities discourages the development of Africa’s agro-industrial value chains. Here, China could play a leading role by shifting its preferential trading agreements from bilateral deals to a single, well-publicized Africa-wide initiative. Another priority is to implement the World Trade Organization Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) fully. In recent years, as concessional finance has become constrained, governments have turned to private borrowing. Because sovereign borrowing often involves high costs and short maturities, a better alternative would be to allow creditworthy countries to borrow from the on-concessional windows of the World Bank and other multilateral development banks

Related tweets, charts, figures from the Report and video of the release;