Weekly Roundup

Hello everyone and welcome to weekly roundup. Below is a selection of news articles and a video that caught our eye from our blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts.  We hope you enjoy the read. 

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013: The Multiple Dimensions of Food Security.  The newest edition of the State of Food Insecurity in the World Series by FAO presents updated estimates of undernourishment and progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and World Food Summit (WFS) hunger targets. The 2013 report goes beyond measuring food deprivation. It presents a broader suite of indicators that aim to capture the multidimensional nature of food insecurity, its determinants and outcomes.

Below a Q&A session on the report

The Global AgeWatch Index 2013  was unveiled by the HelpAge Network on October 1^st, International Day of Older Persons. It is the first ever tool to measure the quality of life and well-being of older people around the world. It responds to the urgent need to tackle the poverty and discrimination faced by the growing numbers of older people across the globe and demonstrates there is much to do. 

Allianz - Open Knowledge, HelpAge, Centre for Social Protection, European Network on Measuring Progress, Institute of Social and Medical Studies, Global Alliance of International Longevity Centres, International Council on Social Welfare, OECD - Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, PRO Global, Wikiprogress and World Bank invite you to participate in their online discussion, on “How should older people’s well-being be measured?” from 3 - 14 October 2013. Here is the short link http://bit.ly/17iDNBy and the hashtags for Twitter are #OlderPeople and #AgeingIndex.

After a Decade of Growth in Africa, Little Change in Poverty at the Grassroots, the most recent Policy Brief by the Afrobarometer Research Center shows the discrepancy between the economic growth in the African continent and the well-being of Africans. More than 50,000 individuals have been targeted in this survey (2010-2) in 34 African countries. 56% of the surveyed considered “bad” or “very bad” the management of the economy by their national governments and 69% had the same opinions on the policies targeting poverty.  67% believed that there was no improvement or a worsening of their quality of life.

Africa’s century?, this brief paper builds its arguments on an article by Myles Wickstead, Head of the UK Commission for Africa, on the OECD Observer, to discuss the economic growth in the continent in the last decade and the challenges to overcome. In the same page, are accessible several background papers of the International Economic Forum on Africa.

Ressources minières: un tremplin pour le développement de l'Afrique  by the Director of UNDP Africa, Abdouaye Mar Dieye. The article was published ahead of this year’s International Economic Forum on Africa which calls for a harnessing of natural resources’ for development. The articles calls for an efficient and transparent exploitation of these resources through taxes and fees; a better use of those taxes in uplifting sectors such as education and health and a progressive diversification of the economy through investments in high added-value sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing.

Below this infographics by Standard Chartered gives a glimpse of the potential of the continent

Políticas Públicas para El Buen Vivir y el Bienestar, the theme for Wikiprogress América Latina’s first online discussion. Only 3 DAYS left to make your points and share the best practices on well-being and “buen vivir” in Latin America. Here is the link:   http://bit.ly/19vQBTK and the hashtag for Twitter: #Bienestar and #PoliticasPublicas

Stay tuned the same time next week for another roundup of the week that was.

Yours in progress,
Wikiprogress Africa

Africa: Making the most of its natural resources

This post by Jan Rielaender, an economist at the OECD Development Centre, marks the launch of the African Economic Outlook 2013.

Africa has made tremendous progress over the last 13 years, going from “hopeless” to “aspiring”, in the words of The Economist. Certainly, Africa’s pace of growth has been impressive, averaging 5.1% of GDP per year – much faster than most OECD countries. Some have dismissed this simply as reflecting only the recent boom in natural resource prices. They point to the fact that prices of most commodities – agricultural, mineral and energy – doubled or even tripled over the same period, and warn that Africa’s growth will come to an end once resource prices taper off, as it is happening now.

This viewpoint misses the real story on two counts. First, natural resources and their improved terms of trade contributed only a third of Africa’s growth. That’s quite a lot, but not enough to make Africa’s growth exclusively a resources story. Instead, much of Africa’s success is actually a productivity story. Applying new methods of measurement, the African Economic Outlook 2013 finds that Africa’s labour productivity increased by close to 3% during the 2000s, with almost half this attributable to workers moving to new activities with higher productivity. By contrast, Latin America’s productivity growth was less than 1%.

Second, rather than being the exclusive drivers of growth, Africa’s natural resources are contributing less than they could do. Agricultural commodities are a striking example: 24% of the world’s agricultural land is in Africa, but only 9% of agricultural production. With regards to mining, spending on exploration in Africa has remained below $5 per square kilometre; in Canada, Australia and Latin America the average is $65 per square kilometre.

So the story of Africa’s growth and natural resources is a mixed bag: On the upside, Africa’s growth rests on a much more diversified base than is often assumed. On the downside, Africa failed to make the most of its natural resource wealth during the recent boom.  Had it done better, overall growth and the type of structural transformation that can provide more and better jobs would have been higher.

“Hang on,” you might say now. “Isn’t it conventional wisdom that for development to take off a country must leave commodities behind and focus on building factories? Shouldn’t it then be a good thing to leave most resources in the ground?” Not quite. If managed well, natural resources can play a crucial role in transforming economies. This can happen through three channels: diversification, capabilities and revenues.

Diversification, which essentially means the range and variety of products a country exports, is an important driver of growth in developing countries. Given the right conditions, natural resources can be an important source of diversification. Chile, for example, used proceeds from copper to invest in new agricultural commodities, such as salmon, that it previously did not export. Malaysia invested its oil revenues in forestry and palm oil, building very successful industries. Indonesia used oil revenues to supply fertilizer to farmers and develop new crops, building the basis for the country’s green revolution.

Capabilities are the cornerstone of structural transformation. In simple terms, these represent the things a country “can do” – its technological know-how and skills, for example, or the quality of its public services in areas like infrastructure, education and health, and much, much more. Countries with strong and diversified natural resource production have more opportunities to develop their capabilities. Take South Africa, which went from supplying simple tools to its miners to become an internationally competitive supplier to the world’s mining industry. Chile successfully developed local know-how on adapting mining technology to local conditions, while Nigeria has started to build up a supplier industry for its resource sectors.

Capabilities make the link between the production of basic commodities and diversification at large. On average, the more unprocessed commodities a country exports competitively, the more manufactured products it exports competitively. For example, South Africa exported 46 raw commodities competitively in 2005 and 197 manufactured final products in 2010. Angola only exported one commodity (oil) competitively in 2005 and 24 manufactured final products in 2010.

Finally, the third channel – revenues – offers arguably the greatest benefit from extractive industries in the short to medium term. Invested wisely, the proceeds from mining and petroleum production can be used to fund many of the crucial inputs for structural transformation such as education and health, as well as infrastructure and strong public services.

So, instead of putting natural resources aside, African countries should look to them for their strengths and the opportunities they offer to create a diversified economy.

This blog was originally posted on the OECD Insights blog, here.

Jan Rielaender
OECD Development Centre

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Perspectives économiques en Afrique 2013:Transformation structurelle et ressources naturelles

Les Perspectives économiques en Afrique (2013) ont été publiées le 27 mai 2013. Le thème de cette année portait sur la transformation structurelle et les ressources naturelles. Cette co-publication de  la Banque africaine de développement (BAD), le Centre de développement de l’OCDE, la Commission économique pour l’Afrique (CEA) et le Programme des Nations unies pour le développement (PNUD), souligne que les perspectives économiques sont prometteuses, mais ne suffisent pas à réduire la pauvreté, le chômage, les inégalités de revenus ni, dans certains pays, à enrayer la détérioration des niveaux de santé et de l’éducation.

D’après le rapport, c’est en exploitant mieux et davantage la richesse de leurs sols que les bénéfices de la croissance économique pourront être distribués à l’ensemble de la population. Atteindre cet objectif, qui est d’améliorer le bien-être des populations africaines, passe ainsi par 4 priorités.

•          Favoriser l’accès au marché afin de mettre en œuvre un processus de transformation structurelle s’appuyant sur les ressources naturelles. L’intégration régionale constitue ainsi un moyen de parvenir à cette fin.
•          Optimiser l’exploitation des ressources naturelles (y compris l’agriculture) par une meilleure gestion de la propriété foncière, des systèmes d’imposition équilibrés et des incitatifs à la diversification des sources de la croissance. Améliorer la qualité de l’engrais ou des semences constitue une avenue : l’Afrique détient 24 pour cent des terres agricoles mondiales, mais elle ne représente que 9 pour cent de la production.
•         Les retombées de l’exploitation des ressources naturelles et des industries extractives doivent bénéficier à l’ensemble de la population et cela passe par la formation de la main d’œuvre, afin qu’elle trouve à s’employer dans de nouvelles activités à plus forte valeur ajoutée.
•          Le renforcement de l’infrastructure (énergie, transport et communication) constitue un moyen de promouvoir la diversification des sources de croissance. Et cela ppasse par une dépense budgétaire prévisible et transparente selon ce rapport.

Pour consulter l'édition de poche, cliquez ici

Pour lire ce rapport dans son intégralité ce rapport cliquez ici

Ousmane Aly DIALLO

Coordonnateur Wikiprogress Africa