tailieunhanh - Policy Responses to the Global Economic Crisis in Africa

If you want to breed your own stock of chickens, you cannot go on using the hybrid breeds, as their high productivity will go down. You can only get high production with hybrid layers if you buy chickens regularly. It is therefore advisable to use local breeds, which are often much cheaper to keep. Another advantage of local chicken breeds is that they are better adapted to local conditions and are less susceptible to diseases than the more fragile hybrids. Local breeds are usually lighter in weight and have smaller eggs than those of hybrid breeds. . | ì JI UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY NUMBER 3 2009 Brie7 Overview Africa is the developing region most at risk from the global economic crisis. Its recent strong growth has been interrupted. Already home to the largest number of low-income countries in the world the region is now likely to experience higher unemployment and poverty increases in infant mortality and difficulty coping with longer-lasting effects such as higher school drop-out rates reductions in health care environmental degradation and a rise in conflict. Africa therefore needs to recover as quickly as possible. In this policy brief we draw on a number of recent UNU-WIDER studies to discuss the policy options for recovery. Written by Augustin Kwasi Fosu and Wim Naude United Nations University 2009 ISBN 978-92-808-3071-2 ISSN 1814-8026 Licensed under the Creative Commons Deed Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY UNU-WIDER World Institute for Development Economics Research Policy Responses to the Global Economic Crisis in Africa The global economic crisis of 2008 has induced two negative external shocks in African countries. The first is a financial shock with the availability of credit declining and the cost of international credit increasing a financial crisis and the second is a shock relating to the demand for and price of exports as most of Africa s important markets went into recession and commodity prices tumbled an economic crisis . These two simultaneous crises pose a huge risk to African growth and development as shown in Figure 1. They have hit precisely at the midpoint of the period given to achieve the Millennium Development Goals MDGs when various assessments had concluded that African countries were behind schedule and when African countries had begun to grow strongly. The real risk now is that progress will be further derailed. As Figure 1 suggests the two crises will depress demand which will lower investment and growth and in turn result in higher unemployment