COVID-19’s impact on overall health care services in Africa
In addition to directly causing the deaths of at least 200,000 people in Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic is also disrupting critical health services and undermining years of progress fighting other deadly diseases, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB), and malaria, which continue to be the leading causes of death in the region. In order to better understand the extent of this impact, a recent report by The Global Fund utilizes data from urban and rural health care facilities in 24 African countries and seven Asian nations to investigate and compare the spillover impacts of the pandemic on essential health care services for HIV, TB, and malaria.
Leo Holtz
Research Assistant – Africa Growth Initiative
Twitter
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In 2020, access to health care services declined significantly throughout the world compared to 2019. The authors attribute this unprecedented decline in patient attendance to challenges facing both medical facilities and the patient community (Figure 1). For patients, the fear of contracting COVID-19 from their visit was the most cited reason for not seeking medical care. The inability to reach health care facilities due to disruptions in public transportation and stay-at-home orders was also a prominent challenge for patients looking to access health care—a problem, according to the authors, that has been more relevant for urban residents.
Figure 1. Reasons for disruption to health care services from the perspective of medical facilities and patients
Source: “The Impact of Covid-19 On HIV, TB and Malaria Services and Systems For Health: A Snapshot From 502 Health Facilities Across Africa And Asia,” The Global Fund, 2021.
For medical facilities, the focus on COVID-19 reduced access to standard health care services overall, as some facilities either reduced or stopped offering some standard medical services or were overwhelmed with treating COVID-19 patients presenting acute symptoms of respiratory infection. While noting that the reduction in overall services is detrimental to all patients’ well-being, the authors warn that hampering access to health care may specifically elevate the mortality rate of children under 5.
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Support for public health: Preparing for the next pandemic
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Strategies for effective health care for Africa in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Landry Signé
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
Because COVID-19 remains the dominant focus of medical practitioners, international donor organizations, and governments, The Global Fund posits that this shift in focus to COVID-19 resulted in a reduction of “general health communication campaigns … [that] encourage people to seek out health care.” As a consequence, testing and treatment of diseases like HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria have dipped.
More specifically, regarding HIV, the authors argue that the interruptions in testing and treatment of the disease, paired with prospective patients’ increased wariness in seeking medical care, may have heightened the risk of individuals unknowingly spreading it. Although Asia experienced the most severe disruptions to HIV health care services, the significant declines in preventive health care services for HIV in Africa pose particularly devastating consequences for the region, as it accounts for 67 percent of the global population living with HIV/AIDS
Figure 2. Impact of COVID-19 on HIV treatment referrals (left) and testing (right)
Note: The line graph describes service delivery for the same period in 2020 (left y-axis).The gray blocks represent the number of COVID-19 cases diagnosed per surveyed facilities (right y-axis).
Source: “The Impact of Covid-19 On HIV, TB and Malaria Services and Systems For Health: A Snapshot From 502 Health Facilities Across Africa And Asia,” The Global Fund, 2021.
Drug-sensitive TB was the most severely affected infectious disease, with a nearly 60 percent decline in diagnoses and a nearly 80 percent decline in treatment referrals relative to 2019 (Figure 3). In Africa, treatment referrals returned to near pre-pandemic levels by September 2020; however, drug-sensitive TB diagnosis in Africa remains off-track, recovering only to roughly 20 percent of 2019 levels in September 2020. Both metrics for TB depict much more severe disruptions to TB health care services in Asia.
Figure 3. Impact of COVID-19 on TB diagnosis (left) and referrals (right)
Note: The line graph describes service delivery for the same period in 2020 (left Y axis).The gray blocks represent the number of COVID-19 cases diagnosed per surveyed facilities (right Y axis).
Source: “The Impact of Covid-19 On HIV, TB and Malaria Services and Systems for Health: A Snapshot From 502 Health Facilities Across Africa And Asia,” The Global Fund, 2021.
The global death rate from malaria has declined 60 percent since 2000, but Africa still accounts for 94 percent of the world’s annual malaria cases and deaths. Importantly, the reduction of malaria treatment in Africa (Figure 4), where the disease is endemic, poses a serious threat to large numbers of susceptible Africans—especially children under the age of 5, who comprise the vast majority of annual malaria deaths.
Figure 4. Impact of COVID-19 on malaria diagnosis (left) and treatment (right)
Note: The line graph describes service delivery for the same period in 2020 (left y-axis).The gray blocks represent the number of COVID-19 cases diagnosed per surveyed facilities (right y-axis).
Source: “The Impact of Covid-19 On HIV, TB and Malaria Services and Systems for Health: A Snapshot From 502 Health Facilities Across Africa And Asia,” The Global Fund, 2021.
The authors warn that the disruption to critical health care services poses a serious threat to undiagnosed individuals, their local communities, and global health security. The risk that undiagnosed individuals will infect others with HIV or TB—or succumb to malaria without pursuing treatment—is now much higher than before the pandemic. Moreover, the authors warn that the pandemic has effectively derailed years of progress in reducing the disease burden in Africa and the rest of the developing world. In response to these challenges, The Global Fund recommends health care facilities implement adaptive measures to reduce the volume of visits to clinics and improve health services delivery. Such actions include providing long-term drug prescriptions to ensure uninterrupted access to medication, door-to-door decentralized distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets, and incorporating TB screening in digital health screenings for COVID-19.
For more on supporting health care systems in Africa, read Africa CDC Director Dr. John Nkengasong’s Foresight Africa 2021 essay, “Building a new public health order for Africa—and a new approach to financing it.” For more on innovative and technological solutions to complex health care challenges, see AGI Senior Fellow Landry Signé’s recent paper, “Strategies for effective health care for Africa in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
Greg Wright
Greg Wright
Property tax compliance in Tanzania: Can nudges help?
Abstract
Low- and middle-income countries around the world struggle with low tax compliance together with limited capacity to enforce compliance. This paper reports the results of a randomly rolled out text-message campaign aimed at promoting compliance among landowners in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Landowners were effectively randomly assigned to one of four groups designed to test different aspects of tax morale. They either received a simple text-message reminder to pay their tax (a test of salience), a message highlighting the connection between taxes and public services (reciprocity), a message communicating that non-compliers were not contributing to local or national development (social pressure), or no message (control). Recipients of any message were 11 percent (or 1.2 percentage points) more likely to pay any property tax by the end of the study period. Across treatments, simple reminders and reciprocity messages delivered similar gains in payment rates, whereas social pressure messages delivered lower gains in payment rates. Actual payment amounts were highest for reciprocity messages. The average estimated benefit-cost ratio across treatments is 20:1 due to the low cost of the intervention, with higher cost-effectiveness for reciprocity messages.
Download the working paper
Industries without smokestacks in Tunisia: Creating jobs in tourism and ICT
Tunisia, like many African countries, is facing an influx of young people into its workforce, but the country doesn’t have enough jobs to absorb them. Recent research, though, reveals that there might actually be great potential and even a comparative advantage for job creation in Tunisia in “industries without smokestacks” (IWOSS). IWOSS are sectors that share much in common with manufacturing, especially their tradability and tendency to absorb large numbers of low-skilled workers. Examples of IWOSS include agro-industry, horticulture, tourism, and some information and communication technology (ICT)-based services.
Through an adequate management of these sectors, job creation and export development could allow the creation of new areas of comparative advantage and have a positive impact on other sectors as well. As Tunisia’s economic growth rate has lowered to 2 percent in the period from 2012 to 2019 (according to the Central Bank of Tunisia), we must consider new strategies and other policy improvements to reverse this trend and boost job creation in the country.
The challenges in this area are spread over several fronts. The Tunisian labor market suffers from a mismatch between labor demand and supply, as well as a strong imbalance linked to the gender gap. This phenomenon mainly concerns women, young people, and graduates (European Training Foundation, 2019). The latter are often excluded from the labor market due to a mismatch of skills required to enter the job market, despite their acquisition of qualifications and degrees.
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Thus, our research proposes a way out of youth unemployment through an analysis of the Tunisian economy since the 1960s, including forecasts following the COVID-19 crisis, with the aim of providing an alternative perspective that looks beyond conventional “smokestacks” manufacturing and builds on strengths to find room for improvement in industrial policy, including nontraditional agriculture or services.
Why are IWOSS so important?
This study aims to show how the job creation, combined with the identification of the skills required to work in a given field, might have a concrete impact in decreasing youth unemployment. The impact of IWOSS on the Tunisian economy emerged as early as the 1980s, when the market shifted toward this new economic sector, which represented 44 percent of Tunisia’s GDP on average between 2015 and 2019.
Furthermore, through a comparative approach with other activities, we find that the growth in value added by activity sector indicates the relative importance of IWOSS sectors—especially the tourism sector, followed by the transport and financial sectors—to the Tunisian economy. Because of their particular potential for growth in the Tunisian context, we examined the specific IWOSS subsectors of tourism, financial services, and ICTs, and found that, generally, their contributions to the Tunisian economy result in a better capacity to resist and adapt to structural shocks.
Table 1. Growth in added values by activity sectors at prices of the previous year (annual change in %)
Source: Table from Mouley, and Elbeshbishi, (2021). “Addressing youth unemployment through industries without smokestacks: A Tunisia case study.” The Brookings Institution.
Recommendations
The COVID-19 crisis had an undeniable impact on all sectors of the Tunisian economy—especially tourism—though agriculture, fisheries, and ICT suffered least. Given the widespread damage on top of the already high youth unemployment rate, a multistakeholder response is essential for creating jobs for young Tunisians. In order to unearth the employment generation capacity of IWOSS sectors, key constraints that inhibit the growth of these sectors have to be addressed. In short:
Tourism. Tunisia still needs some crucial enablers like political stability, public-private partnerships, and the development of promotional campaigns that further enhance Tunisian culture, traditions, and national heritage to make the tourism industry even more prosperous. Building infrastructure, especially improving transport and communications for tourism, would also have a positive impact on other sectors such as agriculture and construction.
Information and communications technology. For the purpose of enabling greater development of the ICT sector, policymakers should commit to enhancing social inclusion and making high-quality ICT training and education accessible. Such interventions could lead to the development of e-Administration and encourage investments in the ICT industry to create jobs. The “Digital Tunisia” and “Smart Tunisia” programs provide a clear strategy to this end.
Financial services. Policymakers should aggressively encourage a transition to digital tools, promote digital payments, and support the development of further technological innovation.
In the end, we find that the ICT, financial services, and tourism sectors can be critical for addressing the country’s jobless growth challenges, if interventions like improved infrastructure, better access to long-term financing, and enhanced digitization, among others, can be implemented.
USAID’s local staff are an overlooked resource to advance locally led development
Last week’s House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing on locally led development highlighted the bipartisan consensus about its numerous benefits. Subcommittee chairman Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) noted that each of the last four administrations has advanced this vital foreign aid reform because “evidence indicates that working with local partners improves the effectiveness and sustainability of our foreign assistance programs.” Ranking Member Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) concurred saying, “until we support meaningful local ownership of local challenges and build the capacity of local organizations to solve these problems themselves, our foreign assistance will not have lasting impact.”
In other recent Congressional hearings, USAID Administrator Samantha Power has repeatedly called for the U.S. Agency for International Development to advance locally led development. “In order for us to get the most out of our programs” she said, “we need to increase local partnerships and address staffing shortfalls,” calling the push toward locally led development “the essence of whether the development we do is going to be sustained over time.” In March, Power struck a similar chord, “effective development is driven by those on the ground with local knowledge and expertise.”
In her July testimony, Power identified USAID’s massive shortage of contracting officers (COs) and agreement officers (AOs) as a critical problem standing in the way of more locally led development. She said each USAID CO “has managed over 65 million dollars annually over the past four years—more than four times the workload of their colleagues at the Department of Defense.” Given such a heavy workload, it may be understandable that some USAID staff would choose the path of less resistance, leading them back to USAID’s traditional U.S.-based implementing partners. In fact, in 2017 USAID found that just 25 of its U.S.-based implementing partners received fully 60 percent of its funding, reducing competition and innovation. Power also explained that, according to the latest data, just 5.6 percent of funding went to USAID’s local partners. Yet, however understandable this procurement shortcut may be, it is leading to U.S. foreign assistance investments that too frequently have no local roots and which essentially evaporate into thin air, as the recent headlines from countries like Afghanistan and Haiti demonstrate all too clearly.
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This nonlocal approach and its negative consequences are recognized by the agency and USAID has already made several attempts to increase implementation through local actors. For example, since 2009, initiatives like Local Solutions, the Local Systems Framework, and the Journey to Self-Reliance, Local Works, the New Partnerships Initiative (NPI), and USAID’s Acquisition and Assistance Strategy have all taken steps in the right direction. Yet the vast majority of USAID’s funding still does not flow through local actors because USAID has not changed its ways of doing business through vigorous procurement reform and the requisite staffing levels of COs and AOs to implement it.
Hitting precisely on these points, in July, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees USAID’s budget (SFOPs), asked Powers what she considered to be a potential strategy for “increasing the localization of our assistance programs” and how additional staff would ensure U.S. funds better support local partner-led initiatives. Coons added, “I look forward to working with you on tackling USAID’s procurement processes and the challenges in terms of both regulations and staffing.” On the House side, SFOPs chairwoman Barbara Lee’s FY22 bill, which has already passed the House, also clearly supports the growth of locally led development, requiring USAID to report to Congress on funding for programs “implemented directly by local and national NGO entities” and also on how USAID plans to increase these resources in the future.
This recognition by top decisionmakers on the Hill and the administration is very encouraging. Finally, the wonky problem of USAID’s business practices has come to light as perhaps the single largest barrier to advancing locally led development. There is urgency to more effectively use U.S. foreign aid, and thankfully, a major part of the solution Power, Coons, and Lee are seeking is already working at USAID and has already proven its mettle in response to the COVID crisis—USAID’s local staff.
When USAID’s foreign service officers (FSOs) were evacuated at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, then Administrator Mark Green, delegated authority to USAID’s local staff, mainly foreign service nationals (FSNs), to continue the work of USAID without their American supervisors. The FSNs were given special temporary authority to sign contracts and obligate funds on behalf of the U.S. government; that is, to act as COs and AOs. By making this delegation of authority permanent, Administrator Power could quickly and significantly increase USAID’s cadre of COs and AOs, opening the door to much greater progress on locally led development. Doing so would also allow the agency to more fully benefit from the local contacts of these very valuable local professionals, who USAID staff regularly refer to as “the backbone of the agency.”
This idea is supported by the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), which called on appropriators to “evaluate the continuation of the expanded management and supervisory roles of Foreign Service Nationals during USAID’s COVID-19 response.” Similarly, the USAID Alumni Association has called for USAID to “accelerate efforts to enhance the roles and responsibilities of Foreign Service National (FSN) employees in USAID’s field missions. This should include responsibilities for program management.” In addition, recently acting USAID Administrator Gloria Steele has also endorsed the idea of local staff having warrants to act as COs and AOs, saying “they stay with USAID, they are retained … so having them keep their warrants will help solve a number of problems at once and is a win-win.”
Quickly increasing the number of USAID COs and AOs by extending or reinstating the warrants of well-qualified and experienced FSNs is well within the authorities of the administrator. To do so most effectively, USAID should be able to increase the salaries for qualified FSNs (enable them to become a grade 12 or 13) in line with the increased responsibilities, authorities, and accountabilities that holding a warrant entails. A clear set of norms to reflect on bias or perceived conflicts of interest in the local context should also be put in place. Then, USAID should also open a pathway for more FSNs to become CO/AOs by having them work under the supervision of FSOs who would then recommend they receive a warrant to sign contracts and agreements.
These steps would also help USAID advance its commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and professional recognition and fairness. Retired FSNs have been vocal about their subordinate position within USAID, and while some mission directors have created FSN senior advisor positions in the front office, USAID’s overall unwillingness to recognize them as fully-capable professionals takes its toll. Former FSNs like Jamal al Jibiri, detailed their reasons for frustration, noting that when American officials arrived at post and met with the FSNs: “They would always have this one line about ‘we would be nothing without you guys; if it wasn’t for you nothing would operate; it’s you guys who run everything so we really need you guys and appreciate you.’” The former Jordanian FSN continued to explain why these statements were so defeating. “If there was a real appreciation for the FSNs,” he said, “it would be reflected in how we are compensated and how we’re seen, but to tell us that everything would fall apart without us, but not to take that into consideration when you’re looking at compensating us or looking at rewarding us, then it’s meaningless.” Unfortunately, many similar accounts can be found in the archives of the Oral History Program of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST).
In this regard, part of the solution to USAID’s critical CO/AO shortage has the potential to advance both locally led development and the effort to decolonize USAID’s staffing model. USAID leaders should carefully consider this opportunity to reduce a major obstacle to achieving the agency’s goals on locally led development. Hill leaders who favor locally led development and DEI should also support this innovation by USAID. The FSNs’ decades of professional contributions and the positive experience of their mission leadership during COVID-19 show that they are ready to do more.
The risks of US-EU divergence on corporate sustainability disclosure
Sustainability disclosure is in vogue, with more than 80 percent of major global companies reporting on some aspects of their social and environmental impacts. This is partly driven by growing calls for transparency by civil society organizations and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investors, who are demanding detailed and verified corporate sustainability information. ESG investments—assets that fulfill certain minimum social and environmental criteria—grew by more than 40 percent in 2020 in the U.S., and currently make up one-third of all assets under management. However, the process of classifying financial assets as ESG is unregulated in the U.S. Moreover, the data required to assess if ESG assets have achieved a positive social and environmental impact is often missing, incomplete, unreliable, or unstandardized.
The U.S. and the EU are pursuing different trajectories in regulating ESG investing and sustainability disclosures. The U.S. is following a laissez-faire approach with sustainable investing and disclosure being guided by voluntary, private-sector-led processes, protocols, and guidelines. Compliance is driven by peer pressure and the competitive drive to build an image as a sustainable, accountable business. In the absence of regulatory intervention, institutional investors that manage index funds—in particular BlackRock, Vanguard, and Mainstreet—have stepped in to take state-like roles by putting pressure on corporations to address systematic risks like climate change.
These voluntary mechanisms, however, have been criticized for being inadequate. Corporations are routinely accused of “greenwashing” their sustainability reports by overstating their positive environmental and social impact and downplaying negative ones. In the absence of detailed, verified information, asset managers can fall prey to greenwashing and classify securities of unsustainable companies as ESG assets. This leaves ESG investors with little assurance, legal or otherwise, that their money has been put to the intended use.
The EU priming for a green future
The EU, on the other hand, is following a systematic and centralized approach toward climate transition and sustainability disclosure. Its regulatory regime is underpinned by the European Climate Law that legally endorses the EU’s commitment to meet the Paris agreement. To achieve climate neutrality by 2050, the continental body has introduced a slew of regulatory measures that will accelerate capital allocation toward green investments.
One of these is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) that was introduced in April 2021. It upgrades the 2014 nonfinancial reporting directive and seeks to improve the coverage and reliability of sustainability reporting. When the law comes into effect in 2023, the CSRD is expected to increase the number of European and Europe-based companies that disclose sustainability information by fourfold, to 49,000 in total.
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The CSRD proposal applies the “double materiality” principle, requiring companies to disclose information that is material for the enterprise as well as for its societal stakeholders and/or the environment. For example, it requires companies to disclose the extent to which their activities are compatible with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Importantly, the directive requires companies to seek “limited” assurance by third-party auditors.
The directive is also unique for requiring companies to report their sustainability performance using EU-wide disclosure standards. The European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG), a private association with strong links with the European Commission, has been tasked with the difficult job of developing these disclosure standards. EFRAG intends to build on existing, third-party sustainability reporting standards and has initiated a collaboration with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), currently the most widely used reporting standard globally.
Alongside a similar sustainability disclosure law that regulates processes of ESG investing in financial institutions, the CSRD is expected to significantly improve transparency in European capital markets. These measures are also likely to increase the adoption of sustainability goals and targets among European corporations, further widening the existing disclosure gap between EU-based and U.S.-based corporations.
A change of heart at the SEC
Until recently, American regulators have been reluctant to mandate sustainability disclosure. At a recent Brookings webinar, Securities Exchanges Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce offered the rationale why ESG rule-making is beyond the mandate of the SEC, reflecting the longstanding view among Republican commissioners at the SEC. Her long list of justifications includes some plausible ones, such as the broad and elastic nature of the ESG concept that would make it ill-suited as a domain of disclosure rule-making. Others were highly slanted, such as the contention that ESG disclosure could drive financial instability by leading to excessive allocation of capital to supposedly green technologies. This is ironic because the lack of ESG disclosure mandate is not slowing down the rapid growth of ESG investments; it is only making the process opaque and ineffective, making stock market volatilities more rather than less likely. In fact, the EU’s key justification for sustainability disclosure is preventing systemic risks that threaten financial stability.
The SEC, which now has a 3-2 Democratic majority and a Biden-appointed chairman, has of late shown keenness to play a more active regulatory role. In May 2020, its Investor Advisory Committee provided recommendations that urged the commission to set up mandatory reporting requirements on ESG issues. In December 2020, an ESG subcommittee issued a preliminary recommendation that called for the adoption of mandatory standards for disclosing material ESG risks. The recommendation, however, called for limited disclosure covering a narrow range of metrics tailored by industry, in a manner similar to the standards of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, while warning against the “highly prescriptive” standards that were purportedly adopted by the EU. In March 2021, the commission solicited public input on climate change disclosures, which revealed strong demand for mandatory sustainability disclosure.
Divergent disclosure laws
The SEC is thus set to adopt mandatory ESG disclosure rules, perhaps as early as October 2021. These rules, however, are likely to depart from the EU’s approach in a number of ways. First, an SEC regulation will target only publicly listed companies; the EU’s CSRD, on the other hand, covers large unlisted firms as well. Second, the SEC will mandate disclosure of a narrow range of outcomes related to climate risk and human capital, while the EU will mandate disclosure of a broader set of sustainability outcomes, including indirect outcomes through the value chain and relevant corporate strategies and processes. Third, given capacity constraints, the SEC will likely adopt less comprehensive, third-party disclosure standards as opposed to developing its own comprehensive standards as the EU intends to do. Facing pressure from Republican lawmakers and interest groups, the SEC’s measures are also likely to be timid, focusing only on protecting (ESG) investors through the narrow lens of financial materiality.
By comparison, the relatively wide coverage of the EU’s new disclosure law (CSRD) will lead to significant improvements in data availability. The use of uniform disclosure standards will also ensure that companies provide more detailed and comprehensive sustainability information. It is, however, less obvious how the directive will improve data quality and reliability. The requirement for limited assurance will reduce the most overt forms of greenwashing but is unlikely to eliminate disclosure of data with dubious quality. For example, such an assurance is unlikely to guarantee that a company used the most recent or robust method for assessing its carbon footprint.
The EU’s law is also unlikely to address the lack of standardization, which is to a degree inherent to ESG metrics. Sustainability disclosure will contain significant company-specific, qualitative data, including retrospective and forward-looking statements that are hard to quantify. The EU’s reporting standards will give managers significant discretion on what to disclose and how, and they impose different requirements for companies that differ by sector and size. More nuanced and detailed sustainability disclosure is more valuable to individual (ESG) investors though, at a macro level, this increases the cost of standardizing, comparing, and verifying the reported data. The search for the “holy grail” of the ideal ESG index will thus continue, hampered by the difficulty to converge on what categories of ESG are universally relevant, how to define their scope, which sets of metrics to use, and how to weigh and aggregate them.
A missed opportunity for coordination?
In both the EU and U.S., the move toward greater corporate transparency will help improve the existing power imbalance between shareholders and stakeholders. The lack of verified disclosure today discourages corporations from reporting unsavory business practices that have devastating societal and environmental impact. Greater transparency, stronger regulatory oversight, and more robust third-party ESG assessment can lead to better public understanding of the positive and negative externalities that corporations create, allowing the market to reward “good” ones and penalize “bad” ones. At the same time, given significant informational asymmetries and inevitable loopholes in principles-based disclosure standards, the tendency of corporations to understate their negative externalities is likely to persist, making greenwashing largely inescapable in the foreseeable future.
These challenges are further exacerbated by the lack of coordination to develop globally acceptable disclosure standards. Conflicting regulatory regimes between the U.S. and EU will harm trade and investment flows across the Atlantic and potentially globally. Frictions are already emerging in the context of the EU’s forthcoming carbon border adjustment mechanism, which will impose tariffs on imports from countries without carbon taxes. In the end, coordination at a global scale is needed to regulate corporate sustainability in a manner that does not sand the wheels of the global trading system.
G-20 support for improved infrastructure project cycles in Africa
Priyadarshi DashResearch and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS)Paulo EstevesBRICS Policy Center
Rob Floyd African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET)
Arthur MinsatDevelopment Center, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Aloysius Uche Ordu SAfrica Growth Initiative, Brookings Institution
Cobus van Staden South Africa Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA)
US economic statecraft adrift as China seeks to join mega Asian trade deal
China’s decision to formally seek to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the world’s most important Asian trade deal, presents the U.S. with an enormous set of economic and diplomatic challenges. China joining CPTPP would deal a significant blow to U.S. economic statecraft and further strengthen Chinese leadership in the Indo-Pacific. Taiwan’s recent announcement that it also wants to join CPTPP further complicates the picture.
The CPTPP is what was left of the original U.S.-led 12 nation deal the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) that was a priority under Presidents Bush and Obama, but which President Trump pulled the U.S. out of in his first week in office.
Since the APEC CEO Summit in November last year, China had indicated its interest in joining CPTPP. Yet, this apparent interest was greeted with skepticism around China’s ability to undertake the economic reforms required to meet the high CPTPP standards, such as more competition for state-owned enterprises, freer flows of data across borders, and curbs on China’s industrial subsidies.
Yet, it is increasingly clear that China’s request to join CPTPP needs to be taken seriously and may happen sooner than expected. For one, China is the largest export market for nine of the current 11 CPTPP countries. Second, it may be less difficult than generally thought for China to meet many CPTPP standards. China could also lean into to the agreements broad exceptions to justify non-compliance. Where China has justified trade restrictions as being about national security, there is also a very broad national security carve out that China could rely on.
Second, in order for many developing countries such as Vietnam to join the agreement, full compliance with various rules needed to be delayed as these governments undertook domestic reforms. This sets the precedence for China to argue that where it is unable to meet CPTPP standards today, similar flexibilities should be extended to China and not delay it becoming a party to the agreement.
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A key question for many governments will be whether they can be convinced of China’s eventual compliance with the CPTPP. The Australian trade minister when asked about China joining the CPTPP noted the need for China to demonstrate a track record of compliance with trade agreements. This speaks not only to China’s recent restrictions on Australia’s exports that are inconsistent with the China-Australia FTA, but also well-documented ways China has avoided its WTO commitments.
The announcement by the U.K. earlier this year of its interest to join the CPTPP likely hastened China’s decision to join. In part as U.K. membership in CPTPP would be another bulwark and hurdle to China joining, and it is harder for CPTPP governments to seriously negotiate U.K. accession, and to then not do the same for China. Taiwan’s request this week to also join the CPTPP will complicate the accession process, as China will oppose Taiwan joining as being at odds with its One-China policy.
So now the U.S. is faced with a flipped script—as China readies to join the CPTPP, it is left on the outside, still unsure how to show leadership on trade in the Indo-Pacific.
Should China succeed in joining CPTPP, this will foreclose the U.S. rejoining the agreement. The U.S. then having to negotiate with China to join the CPTPP is an irony that would be too much to bear. Indeed, re-engagement by the U.S. on trade in the Indo-Pacific region will require the U.S. to start the process again. However, after Trump’s withdrawal from CPTPP, getting other governments to agree to again make high standard trade commitments with the U.S. will be a big lift. In addition, with China party to CPTPP, the economic impact on China of a new U.S.-led trade agreement that excluded China would be significantly diminished. Indeed, China joining CPTPP will for the foreseeable future undercut the effectiveness of U.S. trade policy as a tool for achieving U.S.’ strategic goals with respect to China.
As President Biden made clear in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly this week, the U.S. needs to lead a collation of countries to counter China’s strategic challenges. To do this, the U.S. will need to continuously show up, lead and demonstrate consistency of purpose. This will require a renewed economic engagement strategy for the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. no longer has the luxury of spending precious political capital getting other countries to join a major international economic initiative like CPTPP and then decide to withdraw because it makes for good domestic politics. Leaving CPTPP was costly and China’s decision to join CPTPP has raised the stakes even higher.
Addressing youth unemployment through industries without smokestacks: A Tunisia case study
Abstract
Although the manufacturing sector is known to have a unique role in structural transformation, the industries without smokestacks (IWOSS) that include tradable services, and that concern in Tunisia mainly IT, tourism, transport, trade, and financial services, can provide new opportunities for export development and in turn drive economic growth. As such, and for each of these sectors, Tunisia is particularly well positioned to exploit the opportunities in industries without smokestacks.
This study takes the case of Tunisia and examines the current state and contribution of the industries without smokestacks to the economy and exports with the aim of improving our understanding of the major bottlenecks and solutions to unlocking the potential of these industries. The study gives special attention to the main market service activities cited above, given their great importance in job creation especially for youth. It aims particularly to analyze how youth unemployment can be solved through job creation in these IWOSS industries, as well as the identification of the skills required for these young people to find work.
Download the full case study
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The risks of an uneven economic recovery in an unequal world
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world’s most vulnerable populations through lost lives, health, jobs, incomes, assets, and education. The World Bank’s High-Frequency Phone Surveys (HFPS) help identify the main fault lines along which the pandemic’s unequal impacts are emerging in developing countries (country-level indicators produced with this data are shown in an interactive dashboard). The pandemic intensified inequalities between higher-income and lower-income countries, men and women, and workers from different socioeconomic groups. While the initial impacts of the pandemic reinforced preexisting inequalities, the world must now turn its attention to the risks of an uneven economic recovery and the long-term threat it poses to social mobility and inequality.
Early insights (using harmonized multicountry HFPS data) from April-June 2020 suggested extremely large impacts on incomes, jobs, food security, and children’s education, associated with the stringency of policy measures undertaken during the pandemic. On average, more than one-third of those working before COVID-19 across 52 countries stopped working; more than 60 percent of households reported income losses across 30 countries. A pattern of widening gaps between rich and poor countries emerged early on: Income losses, disruptions to children’s education, and food insecurity were much more common among households in poorer countries. In addition, emergency social transfers were inadequate to offset impacts on income in low-income countries. For example, per capita social protection spending on COVID-19-related measures was $4 on average from March 2020 to May 2021 in low-income countries, compared to nearly $850 per capita in high-income countries.
Within developing countries, the economic impacts seemed to reinforce preexisting inequality patterns. Large segments of the population who were at a disadvantage in the labor market before the shock—women, younger workers, and workers with less education—were much more likely to lose their jobs in the first three months of the pandemic (Figure 1). Income losses were also more likely among respondents with no college education and households with self-employed or casual workers. Access to learning while schools were closed was more severely limited for children in larger households and in households where the survey respondent was less educated. There were some exceptions to these patterns. For example, in some low-income countries, educated workers were more likely to stop working, as they tended to be employed in the urban service sector that was strongly affected by the pandemic.
Men and women also experienced the pandemic with significant differences. While men were more likely to die from COVID-19, women were affected more in other dimensions of well-being. Women disproportionately suffered from mental health impacts and experienced a higher risk of dying during childbirth or having stillbirths. Women shouldered increased responsibility for additional care needs with school closures and increased illnesses among family members, which affects their ability to return to work as economies reopen. As women lost paid work at a higher rate relative to men, their unpaid work went up; and women entrepreneurs were at a greater risk of having their businesses closed than men. Evidence also suggests a steep increase in violence against women during the pandemic.
COVID-19 hit in a world where inequality was already pervasive and socioeconomic mobility was not improving. It may worsen these trends through three main channels:
Lasting impacts of job and business losses, which can be particularly severe for vulnerable workers.
Higher likelihood among poor households to adopt strategies to cope with income losses that reduce their productivity over time.
Disruptions to schooling unequally affecting children from different socioeconomic strata.
Evidence from past crises shows that those who are most affected may take longer to recover. Our analysis of the HFPS data shows early indications of this occurring from the current pandemic.
After severe dips in April-June 2020, income and employment saw a partial rebound by September 2020 in the 17 countries in our sample where policies restricting mobility became less stringent. Encouragingly, food security and employment improved at a similar rate for countries at different income levels. However, the improvements by September did not restore employment to pre-pandemic levels and were not enough to significantly reduce the gaps in initial job losses between women and men, non-college- and college-educated, and young and older workers. For example, female employment had only recovered 30 percent of what was lost between pre-pandemic and May-June (versus 49 percent for men). Furthermore, a detailed analysis of six countries shows that male, younger, and college-educated workers in these countries were less likely to lose their jobs and more likely to find a new job if they lost one.
Particularly among poorer households, much of the recovery may also be driven by lower-quality jobs. In six countries, self-employment accounted for 83 percent of the increase in employment rates from May to September for primary-educated workers, compared to 58 percent for workers with tertiary education. In some countries (such as Nigeria), agricultural employment increased sharply, suggesting individuals took on farm work to cope with other job losses.
While food security continued to improve, data from September 2020-January 2021 for eight countries indicates that disparities by gender and location in employment persisted even as policy stringency improved. There were warning signs about a stagnating recovery—in a sample of 14 countries, the recovery in employment appears to have stalled in the last quarter of 2020.
The pandemic has underscored the need for building an effective and equitable public health system, investing in safety nets and social insurance, and instituting fiscal policy that raises resources fairly and efficiently to finance investments. The first priority is ensuring widespread and equitable access to vaccines. Second, governments need to help children and parents transition back to school and facilitate reentry of workers most likely to remain unemployed. Older and low-educated workers might also require more support to deal with the consequences of rapid technological change. To reverse gender disparities, there must be a concerted, multisectoral effort to empower women and girls worldwide. These recommendations are a first step in what should be a coordinated global effort to prevent the growth in socioeconomic inequities and disparities across income, age, and gender that may result from the COVID-19 pandemic. Making our societies more equitable and resilient to future crises requires taking on structural inequalities today.