Missing infrastructure limits development
One of Germany’s goals under its G20 Presidency is to achieve sustainable economic progress in Africa, particularly through infrastructure investment. A concrete, actionable deliverable could be for the G20 to help support Africa50 – a new Africa-owned and led infrastructure investment initiative – get off the ground.
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All low-income countries have the potential for dynamic economic growth. We know this because we have seen it happen repeatedly: a poor, agrarian economy transforms itself into a middle- or even high-income urban economy in one or two generations. The key is to capture the window of opportunity for industrialization arising from the relocation of light manufacturing from higher-income countries. That was true in the past and remains true for Africa today.
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A fiscal stimulus for a troubled economy.
The German presidency of the Group of Twenty (G20) begins on December 1, 2016, in an even more difficult political context than the previous Chinese presidency. Due to the German federal elections scheduled for the second half of 2017, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government moved forward the Hamburg G20 Summit to July 2017, intensifying the time-constraints on negotiators. Despite the circumstances, the forum should act with more urgency to achieve sustainable and inclusive global economic growth. In what could be a decisive year for the international economy, contributions from other members will be crucial.
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