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Roadmap to Improve North African Economies

2 February 2015

Raphael Kaplinsky image

Professor Kaplinksy was invited to deliver the keynote address, Regional Value Chains for Industrial Diversification, at the Expert Group Meeting (EGM), organised in Rabat, Morocco by the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s North African office in cooperation with UNIDO.

Poorly diversified and facing high unemployment, North African economies are generally specialised in sectors or in dynamic products with low added value. To address this, it is recognised that a significant increase in growth is needed and one lever that could guide the necessary structural transformation is growing participation in global trade through the export of increasingly diverse and sophisticated products. The EGM’s overall objective, therefore, was to validate the report Developing regional value chains to accelerate the diversification and sophistication of North African economies.

In his address, Professor Kaplinsky provided a roadmap to better understand and benefit from global value chains, including developing regional strategies, addressing trade regimes and negotiating with lead firms. The importance of getting the policy mix right, with a combination of conducive trade policies and supply-driven productive policies, was also emphasised

You can read more about GVCs in Professor Kaplinsky’s IKD working paper: Thinning and Thickening: Productive Sector Policies in the Era of Global Value Chains.

 

 

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