Country Economic Memorandum
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Publication
Directions for Reform: A Country Economic Memorandum for Recovery and Resilience in South Sudan
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-06-10)South Sudan is at a crossroads in its recovery, reconstruction, and development. Having gained independence in 2011 after two protracted civil wars, the country twice relapsed into conflict: first in 2013 and again in 2016. While the economy began to recover following the 2018 peace deal, progress has stalled amidst a multitude of crises – including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate shocks, and dwindling oil production. At the same time, the broad-based rise in commodity prices due to the war in Ukraine have on balance affected South Sudan adversely. A decade after independence, South Sudan remains caught in a web of fragility and economic stagnation, with weak institutions, recurring cycles of violence, and ubiquitous poverty. Overall, the conflict is estimated to have cost South Sudan an accumulated loss in aggregate GDP of some US$81 billion during 2012 – 2018, equivalent to $11.6 billion per year on average (80 percent of 2010 GDP). Consequently, South Sudan’s real GDP per capita in 2018 was estimated at being one third of the counterfactual estimated for a non-conflict scenario. With the fragile peace deal largely holding despite challenges in implementation, the authorities initiated an ambitious reform program aimed at macroeconomic stabilization and modernization of the young country’s public financial management systems. This report discusses South Sudan’s economic performance since independence, with a focus on leveraging the country’s endowments of natural capital – oil and arable land – to support recovery and resilience. Three messages emerge from this report. First, there is a peace dividend in South Sudan. South Sudan’s real GDP per capita in 2018 was estimated at one third of the counterfactual estimated for a non-conflict scenario. Thus, maintaining peace can by itself be a strong driver of growth. Second, with better governance and accountability, South Sudan’s oil resources can drive transformation. Third, South Sudan’s chronic food insecurity could be reversed with targeted investments to improve the resilience of the agricultural sector. -
Publication
Pathways to Sustainable Growth in Niger: A World Bank Group Country Economic Memorandum
(Washington, DC, 2022)This country economic memorandum aims to support Niger’s efforts to walk on a path conducive to a resilient and sustainable economic growth. It does so by attempting to answer the following five questions, each of which constitutes a separate chapter: (i) what were the salient structural characteristics of Niger’s growth performance in the last 20 years; (ii) what are the margins to accelerate growth in the medium to long term; (iii) how can technology be a vehicle for private sector development; (iv) how can the country’s large natural resource endowments be managed in a transparent way that benefits the whole population; and (v) how can the current disaster management framework be strengthened to increase resilience to natural shocks -
Publication
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 3. Estimating the Spillover Economic Effects of Foreign Conflict - Evidence from Boko Haram
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-12)Violent conflicts present a formidable threat to regional economies. Throughout the world, border regions in many countries are possibly impacted by the cross-border economic effects of regional insurgencies in neighboring countries or national state failures, i.e. "bad neighbors". This raises two questions. First, what is the magnitude of the spill-over economic effects of foreign conflict and what are the channels through which they operate Second, what policies can governments adopt in the potentially exposed regions to mitigate such spill-over effects. In this paper, we adopt a difference-in-difference (DiD) framework leveraging the unexpected rise of the Boko Haram insurgency in Northeastern Nigeria in 2009 to study its economic effects in neighboring areas in Cameroon, Chad and Niger that were not directly targeted by Boko Haram activities. We find strong cross-border economic effects that are likely driven by reduced trade activities, not the diffusion of conflict. Factors of local economic resilience to this foreign conflict shock then include trade diversification and political and economic securitization. More generally, conflicts, if they have regional economic effects, may necessitate regional responses. -
Publication
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 7. Trade Patterns and Trade Networks in the Lake Chad Region
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)The Lake Chad Region (LCR) is an economically interdependent area that encompasses parts of Cameroon (Extrême-Nord), Chad (Chari Baguirmi, Hadjer Lamis, Kenam, and Lac), Niger (Diffa and Zinder), and Nigeria (Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe). The region is characterized by strong historical, ethnic, cultural, and political ties, as well as commercial linkages that extend across its porous borders. Indeed, many if not most of the cross-border exchanges are not recorded in official import and export statistics. Informal trade is widespread throughout Africa (Bouet, Pace, and Glauber 2018; World Bank 2020), particularly if formal state institutions are under stress. Traders try to avoid import or export declarations as well as border taxes, and customs and other border agencies often tolerate the cross-border trade of small consignments without the need to comply with formal procedures. This does not necessarily mean that these trade flows go untaxed, though. Border officials might levy fees that do not have a legal basis, and state or local authorities often ask for informal payments at roadblocks or in marketplaces. The LCR is far from a seaport and, hence, heavily landlocked. This condition means that the cost of connecting to international markets is high. As a result, consumers in the LCR pay a high price for imports from global markets, whereas producers in the region get a low price for their exports to international clients. The region faces other challenges that stress its production base and depress economic development. These challenges include erratic weather patterns with frequent periods of drought, as well as environmental degradation of the lake. The most important threat to the well-being and the livelihood of the population in recent years has been the deteriorating security situation, though. -
Publication
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Development for Peace
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)This report sheds light on the interlocked long-term territorial development challenges and the recently realized systemic risks affecting the Lake Chad region. It summarizes the findings of seven technical papers, each investigating different aspects of the interlinked challenges faced by the region. These studies are accompanied by complementary research on labor market and geospatial socioeconomic trends, as well as by a review of the thin literature on economic development across the region. In addition to presenting the main results of the technical papers, the report positions the findings in the broader context of an analytical framework depicting the feedback mechanisms between the region’s territorial development gaps and the self-reinforcing link to shocks, namely, violent conflict and climate change. This analytical framework is presented in Section 1.2. The rest of the report is structured as follows. Section 1.3 describes the main social and economic trajectories in the region. It reviews long-term demographic trends, suggesting. Section 1.4 argues that the low-growth, high-poverty equilibrium observed in the region is closely linked to the region’s economic geography. Section 1.5 discusses how the impact of climatic variation and violent conflict experienced in the region interlink with and exacerbate the territorial development challenges. Section 1.6 presents policy directions structured around four crosscutting themes: infrastructure, trade, governance, and natural resource management. The crosscutting nature of these themes encourages the exploration of potential synergies across challenge areas. The discussion in the section aims to inform policy-making efforts to strengthen territorial development and mitigate the impacts of conflict and climate change. Such endeavors can increase the likelihood of breaking free from the self-reinforcing negative mechanisms and boost the potential return of the region to a path of stability and inclusive economic development. -
Publication
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 6. Building Rural Development in the Lake Chad Region
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)This paper examines the relationship between access to markets and land cultivation following Berg et al. (2018) using panel methods. Then, author contextualize these results within the broader recent development challenges of the Lake Chad region. The results provide evidence that an increase in market access is associated with an increase in cultivated land and is positively associated with an increase in local agricultural GDP. Even so, conflict from the rise of Boko Haram in the past decade can attenuate gains whereby the proximity to conflict events in the previous year is associated with less cropland across the entire region and less night time lights from over a hundred local markets nearby Lake Chad. This paper makes two contributions. First, the importance of market access as part of economic development is well known, yet advancements in measurement of agricultural activity derived from satellite data and recent data are necessary to gain current insight given developments in the region. Second, this paper contextualizes the findings of market access with local conditions given the numerous conflict events in the past decade from Boko Haram. The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section two describes the data sources while section three presents the empirical framework, section four presents the results, and section five concludes. -
Publication
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 1. Socioeconomic Trends in the Lake Chad Region
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)The Lake Chad region, which is an economically-and socially integrated area spanning across four countries of Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria in north-west Africa, has been trapped in a vicious circle of suboptimal territorial development and fragility. This note shows that the Lake Chad region lags in multiple dimensions of development ranging from poverty, human capital, and access to services. A poverty rate in the Lake Chad region is found to be much higher than other parts of the countries surrounding the lake. The regional poverty rate in the Extreme North region of Cameroon (59 percent) is three times higher that of the rest of the country (19 percent). In Nigeria, the Lake Chad region203 has a poverty rate (72 percent) nearly twice as high as in the rest of the country (38 percent). Chad is the only exception, where the poverty rate in the country’s Lake Chad region (31 percent) is lower than the rest of the country (40 percent).204 This is explained by the fact that the Chad region around the lake lies near the capital of the country, with a consequently higher urbanization rate and a relatively high population density. The note is organized as follows. Section 2.2 provides key statistics on poverty, sector of work, and human capital indicators in the Lake Chad region vis-à-vis other parts of the country and examine how the Lake Chad lags behind in different dimensions. Section 2.3 provides a diagnostic of economic geography with a focus on three dimensions of density, distance and division. Section 2.4 identifies a set of structural factors, aggregate shocks and selected policies that might be associated with the dynamics of economic activity and social inclusion across the region. -
Publication
Lake Chad Regional Economic Memorandum: Technical Paper 5. Conflict and Climate Change in the Lake Chad Region
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-09)Peace and security are basic conditions for economic and social development. Conflict, on the other hand, can reverse years of economic growth and induce long-term harm on almost all aspects of development. For the past decade, the Lake Chad region has been the setting of conflicts between government forces and armed groups, most notably the Boko Haram. Although the intensity of fighting has petered off in recent years, the conflict has spread from Northern Nigeria and now affects all four countries of the region. Due to the paramount importance of avoiding armed conflict, a large economic literature exists that seeks to find explanations for the onset and prevalence of conflict in developing countries. Blattman and Miguel [2010] list some of the most common theories of conflict including competition for resources, economic grievances, and the possibility of looting. This paper attempts to shed light on the geographical distribution of conflict and its climatic determinants in the Lake Chad region following a sub-national approach where readily available spatial data is employed at two different units of aggregation: Firstly, 90 second level administrative areas, and secondly, around 5,318 grid cells covering the same region. Exposure to conflict is here defined as the intensity (for districts) or incidence (for cells) of conflict in a given unit each year. Parts of the population may not be directly exposed by this definition, but since the units of analysis are relatively small, most will be affected in some ways, for instance by safety concerns when visiting the nearest towns to trade or by the general economic consequences. -
Publication
Kosovo Country Economic Memorandum, November 2021: Boosting Foreign Direct Investment
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11)Foreign direct investment (FDI) can bring many benefits to Kosovo’s economy, creating more and better jobs and spurring greater and more resilient economic growth. Many transition economies have used FDI as a pillar of their structural transformation and modernization efforts. The small number of firms in Kosovo that include FDI are more productive than other firms, and they were more resilient in the wake of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) economic recession. In Kosovo, FDI inflows have been concentrated in sectors that provide limited potential for productivity spillovers and benefits to the domestic economy. Kosovo needs to adopt proactive policies to strengthen its investment competitiveness and investor outreach in order to unlock more and higher-quality FDI. This note presents an ambitious reform agenda that can help improve Kosovo’s investment competitiveness and investor outreach. It presents a step-by-step reform program for unlocking the full potential of FDI for economic growth and job creation in Kosovo that the government can implement in the short to medium term. The note is structured in three sections. The first section looks at Kosovo’s FDI performance and assesses the quantity and quality of the FDI attracted so far. The second section benchmarks Kosovo’s locational FDI determinants, considering a set of macroeconomic and microeconomic indicators for its overall FDI competitiveness. The third section combines the findings from the first two sections with an in-depth assessment of Kosovo’s policy, legal, and institutional framework for investment to present a targeted reform agenda and policy action plan to help attract more and higher-quality investments to Kosovo. -
Publication
Mozambique - Country Economic Memorandum: Reigniting Growth for All
(Washington, DC, 2021-10)Mozambique has experienced rapid growth for over two decades. Growth accelerated remarkably following the end of the civil war, averaging 7.9 percent over 1993-2015, among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, growth decelerated sharply following the hidden debt crisis in 2016, which led to a crisis of economic governance and a protracted economic slowdown, with growth falling to 3 percent in 2016-2019. The growth slowdown has been further exacerbated by the natural disasters in 2019, the insurgency in Northern Mozambique, escalating since 2017, and the global pandemic since 2020. Mozambique’s existing growth strategy has been limited in its capacity to generate productive jobs and support accelerated poverty reduction. However, the discovery of some of the largest natural gas (LNG) reserves in the world is expected to provide Mozambique with a transformative opportunity for sustained and inclusive growth. The Mozambique Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) assesses Mozambique’s current growth model and presents a set of recommendations to: (i) make the best use of the non-renewable natural resource revenues, which includes putting in place an adequate policy and institutional framework well ahead of the revenue windfalls from the LNG sector; and (ii) promote growth in non-extractive sectors, accompanied by spatial transformation, and improved agricultural productivity. The report consists of five chapters. Chapter one provides an overview of Mozambique’s current growth model, asking what’s driving growth and outlining why this model needs rethinking. Chapter two provides analysis of the potential impact of Mozambique’s resource boom on GDP, exports, revenue, and employment, and discusses how to make good use of the opportunities and manage the associated risks. Chapter three tells Mozambique’s growth story from a spatial perspective. It constructs a unique district-by-district sectoral GDP database to identify the main growth nodes in Mozambique and understand why there is a weak link between growth and poverty reduction. The services sector is the subject of chapter four, exploring how to overcome bottlenecks to deliver on its potential to drive growth in Mozambique. Chapter five continues this theme, examining the challenges posed to private sector growth by weak governance and rising corruption. All five chapters make policy recommendations for the way forward.