With public finances stretched to the limit and the pandemic making things worse by the day, new IMF research looks at innovative ways to get the private sector more involved in financing Africa's development needs. Economist Luc Eyraud led the research. In this podcast, he says while fixing the business environment is a good place to start, sometimes it is simply not enough. Transcript: https://bit.ly/3wOSJHz
Read the blog at: blogs.imf.org
There will be no durable end to the economic crisis until enough people around the world are vaccinated against Covid-19 and its variants to put the health crisis behind us. Economist Ruchir Agarwal and IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath have joined forces to come up with a plan that would make that happen. In this podcast, Agarwal says the return on investment for ending the pandemic could reach $9 trillion, one of the highest-return investments ever.
Transcript: https://bit.ly/2Tzl6L6
When the apartheid regime ceded power following South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, the economy was in shambles. Debt service costs as a share of GDP were crippling. Trevor Manuel—a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle and appointed minister of finance—revamped the budgeting process and set a stringent deficit reduction target. By 2006, the economy was growing at its fastest pace in more than two decades. In this podcast, Manuel looks back at what drove the country's longest phase of economic growth and how he believes the ruling party he helped establish has lost its way. Read the Transcript.
Transcript: https://bit.ly/3pDMLXp
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