Post-pandemic Africa calls out to Western industrial and financial partners

Africa becomes a major player in the debate on the world economy, following a speech by the director of the International Monetary Fund's Africa department, Abebe Aemro Selassie, at a conference last March 20 at the Center for the Study of African Economies in Oxford.

Africa has always been the subject of debates about the risks and opportunities that could result from increased investment in the African continent. According to Selassie, it is the continued contraction of financing flows to African countries that is the main problem facing the continent's economy today.

Pandemic and Russian-Ukrainian war complicit, African economies now face an increasing burden of interest on public debt as a proportion of total government spending, with fewer and fewer funds available from which to draw. The slowdown in China's direct investment in recent years jointly with foreign direct investment aimed almost exclusively at natural and energy resources rather than local infrastructure combine with the depletion of IMF pandemic aid flows and the backwardness of the financial sector, the main cause of the scarcity of private savings to invest.

Selassie is critical of the world's major economies for their lack of cooperation with the African continent, whose growth is in danger of coming to a heavy halt. A slowdown in the growth of African countries is not in anyone's favor, especially because of its growing repercussions on global GDP, so finding the perfect recipe to untie this knot is a shared concern. 

The solution that the director of the Africa department of the International Monetary Fund proposes to manage this risky environment is a restructuring of public and external debt (avoiding the danger of default), juxtaposed with greater international aid directed at modernizing the productive and infrastructural network (perhaps co-financed by the public sector of African countries), including also the network of banking and financial services.

An investment in the African continent offers great opportunities for major Western manufacturing sectors, including for Italian companies. Suffice it to think of the development of the civil and residential construction sector in the large urban realities of Africa and, therefore, the opportunities for ceramic tile manufacturers, despite competition from China (considering the growing costs of logistics for more remote destinations), but also the scope for development in the export of capital goods, given the growth of African markets in the direction of modern production and distribution of consumer goods. 

It is no coincidence that Africa represents the area with the greatest potential in the next four years, according to the Mecs Study Center's "Cube" forecasting model on the world packaging machinery market: although small in absolute terms (about 1.4 billion euros), the African market for packaging and packaging technologies is expected to grow at a rate of 5.3% per year between now and 2026, compared with a world average of 3.8%.