european think tanks group
Italy holds the G20 presidency at a crucial moment when the world is confronted with the worst global pandemic in the past century. The economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 crisis has had major impact on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda.
The study looks at the challenges facing industrialisation in African countries, in particular the issues for the policy framework needed to support it. It identifies three positive issues that have appeared during the Covid-19 crisis which will be important in economic recovery efforts: (1) repurposing, accelerated pharma production and joint procurement; (2) increased attention to agro-processing; and (3) use of technological advances.
Digitalisation is the use of digital technologies and digitised data in enterprises and organisations, with far-reaching implications for how work gets done and how customers engage and interact with operations. There can be no doubt that digitalisation is transforming business models, revolutionising societies and creating new revenue streams around the globe. Now, more than ever, we need to understand and harness the power of digitalisation, to further the global common good.
Covid-19 brought a brief respite in the growth of carbon emissions. The challenge now is to achieve a long-term decrease. We must seize the moment to turn the coronavirus crisis into the green opportunity the world needs most.
There is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to respond and recover from the current global health emergency and economic fallout resulting from COVID-19. A combination of pragmatic solutions is needed to face the debt issue and give countries room to make the policy choices and investments that will also lay foundations to recover, putting people and nature at the heart of economic growth and development.
The need for a greener recovery geared towards meeting environmental targets and climate neutrality, a subject of intense debate since the beginning of the crisis, is at the heart of the European recovery plan announced this week. The acceleration of the Green Deal is presented as one of the two pillars that should guide the European economic recovery, alongside the digital transition.
This paper stresses the importance of filling the development financing gaps that have been widened by shrinking remittances and suggests adaptations and increases in official development assistance (ODA) as an immediate solution to cushion some of the short-run effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Also, the paper highlights the short- and medium-term measures that policymakers and development partners in both sending and receiving countries should take to lessen the decline in remittance flows.
The European project was built on the ashes of two world wars. The ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the most devastating pandemic afflicting humankind in the last century, may be its undoing. Or can it become the catalyst for building a stronger European Union for the future? The jury is still out.
International development cooperation risks being deeply affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, with potentially disastrous consequences among fragile states.
Twenty-twenty should have been the year of a fundamentally new Africa-Europe partnership, culminating in the sixth EU-AU summit in October in Brussels. Ursula von der Leyen, with a delegation of some 20 European commissioners in her wake, recently traveled to Addis Ababa for meetings with their African Union counterparts.
