[CUTS-TradeForum] China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Boosting trade opportunities for Sub-Saharan Africa.

From: CUTS International

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Boosting trade opportunities for Sub-Saharan Africa

Garth le Pere

Trade Hot Topics, The Commonwealth, Issue 143

Despite the recent discourse about ‘Africa rising’, the continent’s growth and development prospects remain challenging. Optimism about Africa’s future was based largely on aggregate pre-2008 growth rates of 5.5 per cent, and this owed mainly to robust global commodity demand, principally from China. Now, the contagion effects of the 2008 global financial crisis continue to haunt African countries in the form of volatile currencies, reduced inward investment flows, shrinking remittances from abroad and declining commodity prices. These effects point to several causal factors that still hamper Africa’s growth and development and underscore its vulnerability.

Poverty is a major factor, affecting close to 400 million Sub-Saharan Africans who continue to survive on less than US$1.25 a day.1 Levels of poverty are exacerbated by joblessness, particularly among 200 million youth aged between 15 and 24. However, there is also the collateral impact of other factors, such as rising levels of inequality, mortality, food and energy insecurity, destructive conflicts, religious extremism, ethnic and gender violence, environmental degradation and migration.

Please read this paper at:

http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/commonwealth/development/china-s-belt-and-road-initiative_361532ff-en#.WbDdTrIjGUm

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