World Bank

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network brings to you an update of African sovereign debt news and updates on events and happenings on and about Africa that reveal how sovereign debt issues are engaged by the various stakeholders.

As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank hold their spring meetings this week, the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network, (AfSDJN), calls on IMF and World Bank Members to add to their agenda for consideration of their Fall Meeting from October 15-17, 2021, long term solutions for Africa’s sovereign debt crisis.

March 22, 2021

I am thankful to the organisers of this Forum for the invitation to speak on African sovereign debt ahead of the African Finance, Development and Planning Ministers Meeting from March 17th to 21st, 2021. As Civil Society Organizations, we are meeting at a crucial time, as African leaders devise strategies to support the continent’s recovery from COVID-19 induced economic devastation.

I am angry but Hopeful.

The African Sovereign Debt Justice Network brings to you an update of African sovereign debt news and updates on events and happenings on and about Africa that reveal how sovereign debt issues are engaged by the various stakeholders.

A Flurry of African Sovereign Debt News brings to you regular updates on events and happenings in Africa that reveal how sovereign debt issues are engaged by the various stakeholders.

Brazil has been a challenging environment for businesses, in great part, due to the complexity and inefficiency of its tax system. Despite some controversy about the necessity of a wide and structural tax reform, the topic has been treated as a priority by the President and Congressional leaders, but the bills that currently address the tax reform have struggled to make significant progress in the Brazilian Congress. Besides, uncertainties remain as the Federal Administration may present and endorse a proposal, which could include the creation of a Digital Services Tax (“DST”).

The brief discussions in this blog post highlight critical aspects of the contemporary dynamics of commodity dependence that challenge the optimism of the GVCD approach as espoused by multilateral development agencies and the WTO. Moreover, it raises further questions on the political economy of commodity dependency and industrial policy in SSA that deserve attention.

The importance of technology transfer in holding together the links and processes of the global value chain tells us a lot about value accretion and control of the chains. The concept of the global value chain, especially as it is portrayed in documents like the Global Value Chain Development Report 2019 and in the 2020 World Bank’s Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains is non-hierarchical.

WTO members should revisit the liberalization commitments with a view to engaging in further impact assessments of present and proposed liberalization commitments. More importantly, international and national trade policy makers should welcome new imaginaries of a global digital economy, including the use of trade policy tools to make domestic digital economies competitive at the global stage. This requires a re-conceptualization of the foundations of international trade law, and national tax, competition, property, privacy and data protection laws.

This post engages with the Global Value Chain Development (GVCD) reports co-published by the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. It focuses on one central claim these reports have made about the development-related benefits of firms’ participation in GVCs, and on the policy recommendations that follow. The claim is that by inserting themselves into global value chains (GVCs) and technologically upgrading, firms can move up the value-added ladder and capture a greater share of the economic rewards, thereby also benefiting workers and their states in terms of employment, income and taxation.