Abstract
In Senegal, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant health and economic damage. More specifically, the country’s promising industries without smokestacks (IWOSS) have adversely been impacted, with a dramatic reduction in turnover, investment, and jobs. In addition, the pandemic has significantly reduced fiscal space by both shrinking the government tax base and reducing sovereign debt solvency, and, hence, its international credit ratings. All of these repercussions have contributed to lowering the state’s capacity to undertake investments and implement reforms to boost the IWOSS sectors, and might further result in delaying needed actions to unleash IWOSS potential in Senegal. This brief updates the spring 2021 working paper (Mbaye et al., 2021) on how support to IWOSS in Senegal can create jobs, taking into account the far-reaching effects of the pandemic.
