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The Aug. 20 letter highlighted that a free trade pact with Kenya would be “the appropriate next step in recognizing and strengthening relations, economic opportunities, and a security partnership between the United States and Kenya.”

Kenya began negotiations on a trade deal with the U.S. during the Trump administration. The Biden administration has stalled the negotiations without specifying whether or how Washington would resume the talks.

The letter to Tai made the case that the Biden administration has a “historic opportunity” to work toward a trade agreement with Kenya, which would be the first such pact between the U.S. and a sub-Saharan African country.

The letter further noted that “as the U.S. increasingly partners with Kenya to combat al-Shabab and other terrorist groups, it is more important than ever to recognize Kenya as an important ally in the Horn of Africa.”

Indeed, a trade agreement with Kenya is clearly in America’s interest. Regrettably, however, the Biden administration has shown little appetite for restarting stalled trade negotiations with Nairobi.

During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing in May, Tai did state the necessity of making sure that what we do with Kenya will “reinforce all of the things that Kenya is doing in Africa, not take away from that.”

Two months later, when she announced and highlighted a “U.S.-Africa trade ministerial” that will be held later this year, Tai said the ministerial would be focused on how to “build” on the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

Currently, the cornerstone of America’s economic engagement with Africa is the 21-year-old African Growth and Opportunity Act. A preferential trade program, it offers eligible sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to the U.S. market for more than 1,800 goods until 2025.

More can and should be done to build on the African Growth and Opportunity Act and upgrade it to strengthen and broaden commercial ties with Africa.

A renewed U.S. effort to promote economic freedom across Africa should also be a central part of America’s long-term mission to assist African countries. Greater economic freedom, reinforced by trade freedom, is the long-term solution to the continent’s weak health security capacities and many more of its economic and social challenges.

It’s notable that in commemorating the launch of the Organization of African Unity, Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health, and global human rights, in June stressed that, moving forward, U.S. policy toward Africa should be more about trade and investment, less about aid.

She further underlined that “we will need to be aligned—like a lot of other countries around the world that view the continent of Africa as a partner—as an investment partner, a business partner, and not view the continent of Africa as a place where we need to deliver charity.”

While the U.S. cannot provide the leaders of foreign nations the political will needed to transform their economies according to free market principles, it can support the cause of economic freedom through consistent policy dialogues with its African partners and by providing technical help for reform-minded countries.

A readily available and practical next step toward that strategic objective would be for the Biden administration to resume negotiations aimed at hammering out a free trade agreement with Kenya as noted by the senators’ letter.

Anthony B. Kim researches international economic issues at The Heritage Foundation, with a focus on economic freedom and free trade.

To read the full commentary from The Heritage Foundation, please click here.

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The appellate body basically functions as the supreme court for global trade. It hears appeals regarding decisions by WTO dispute settlement panels. Its rulings are binding on member states. Around two-thirds of all WTO disputes are appealed and reach the appellate body. There are seven seats on the appellate body and the system requires a minimum of three judges to form a panel to adjudicate a given dispute. Since December 2020, all seven seats on the appellate body have been vacant. 

What caused this disruption to the appellate body?

Starting in 2017, the United States began blocking all new appointments to the appellate body as the terms of its judges expired. Without a functional appellate body to hear cases, the country ruled against in a dispute can bypass a panel’s decision just by filing an appeal, which has major implications for the WTO’s ability to mediate disputes. This move was part of a wider approach to global governance under President Donald Trump, which I have characterized as an assault on the liberal trading order. 

What were the grievances motivating US policy towards the WTO’s appellate body?

During his tenure, Trump arbitrarily imposed tariffs on all of the United States’ major trading partners, launched a trade war with China, and blatantly violated the rules of the WTO – even repeatedly threatening to withdraw from the institution. Under Trump, the United States really began behaving as something of a rogue state in international trade.

This assault was part of a broader trend. The United States has been articulating complaints about the appellate body since the early 2000s. It was actually the Obama administration which first began blocking the reappointment of judges to the appellate body. But it was under President Trump that this escalated. What is motivating this shift? The United States has articulated a lengthy list of procedural complaints against the appellate body, but there is also a wider concern in Washington that the WTO system has failed to address China’s trading practices.

How did the European Union (EU) respond to the appellate body crisis?

The EU’s key intervention was to propose the multi-party interim appeal arbitration arrangement, or MPIA. The idea behind this was to replicate, as closely as possible, the practices and procedures of the appellate body. This interim appeals arrangement applies only to participating states, but any WTO member state can join. By now [July 2021], over 50 states have agreed to participate, and this number will probably rise if the appellate body crisis continues. 

In your article you present the EU as the major player leading the response to President Trump’s obstruction. What dynamics enabled the EU to play this role? 

The main reason behind the EU’s success in taking a leadership role is its willingness to put forward a concrete solution, however temporary, to the appellate body crisis. Ultimately, the MPIA is a stop-gap measure – akin to triage or battlefield medicine – but it is respected as a means of salvaging the trading system and preventing the United States from destroying the WTO’s foundational rules and principles. More broadly, the EU holds a lot of credibility as a long-standing champion of multilateralism. If trade tensions between the United States and China continue to escalate, perhaps the EU is best placed to act.

Why did we not see a stronger response from China towards US policy on the WTO under Trump?

When Trump came to power, China tried to present itself as a country that was going to step in and play a leadership role – as a champion of globalization and the liberal trading order. But that’s not what we’ve seen at the WTO. China has certainly been an important partner in the MPIA initiative led by the EU, but very much as a follower of the EU’s lead. China doesn’t seem to have either the will or the ability to play the same kind of role as the EU in advancing system-preserving initiatives. 

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that China lacks credibility as a defender of the rules-based trading system because of its own use of protectionist trade policies, and its attempts to weaponize trade as an instrument of economic coercion. We saw this, for instance, when China blocked imports from Canada, and also imprisoned two Canadian citizens, in retaliation for Canada’s participation in the Huawei extradition trial. Second, there is a widespread sense amongst WTO member states that China’s commitment to the rules-based trading system is really only partial and that China will violate the rules when it is in its interest to do so. As a result, Chinese efforts to assume leadership at the WTO have been greeted by a lot of distrust and suspicion.

What has this episode revealed about the strength of multilateral institutions such as the WTO, in the face of spoiling tactics from major powers?

The WTO is unique amongst international institutions because it has a powerful enforcement mechanism – the dispute settlement system. However, the fundamental vulnerability is that if powerful states like the US and others won’t participate in the system and be bound by its rules, they quickly risk becoming irrelevant. And that’s the situation we’re in right now with the appellate body crisis, where, without a functioning mechanism to ensure that WTO rules are enforced, the entire system of global trade rules risk collapsing. Ironically, the United States has been the leader of the liberal trading order for the past 70 years, but since Trump, it has become its leading saboteur.

What are the implications of a permanent collapse of the international trading system?

The very real danger from such a breakdown is a return to what we saw in the 1930s. In response to the outbreak of the Great Depression, you had countries imposing trade barriers, blocking imports from other state, and a general escalation of tit-for-tat protectionism. This response wound up not only exacerbating the effects of the depression itself but has also been credited by some as paving the way for the outbreak of the second world war. The reason why institutions like the WTO were created in the first place was to prevent a recurrence of the 1930s protectionist trade spiral. The danger now – if those rules become meaningless and unenforceable – is the institutional foundations of postwar economic prosperity could unravel, throwing us back into economic chaos and potentially political disorder.

What does the WTO’s future look like under new director-general Dr Okonjo-Iweala?

Dr Okonjo-Iweala has certainly made an encouraging start to her term, but the truth is the position of director-general itself holds very limited powers. The WTO is very much a member-driven organization. The director-general plays a role in trying to broker cooperation between states, but as we have seen the future of the WTO relies on the powerful states like the United States following the rules.

Despite the election of President Biden – and his professed commitment to multilateralism, international cooperation and the rule of law – there has not yet been any shift in US policy on this issue. Even under Biden, the US continues to block appellate body appointments and is yet to lift controversial tariffs on steel and aluminum which affect virtually all of the United States’ big trading partners. The United States remains in violation of international trade law. There is no indication that Biden intends to bring it into compliance in the near future.

One key moment for assessing the future health of the WTO is the ministerial meeting scheduled for 30 November 2021, where a critical agenda item will be brokering a new agreement on fishery subsidies. This is one of the sole active areas of multilateral negotiations at the WTO right now and was mandated as part of the UN sustainable development goals. Not only is this issue critical for global environmental policy, but also for global development because so many states depend on fisheries for food security and livelihoods. So, this could be a crucial test case for whether the WTO can maintain its function as a forum for delivering multilateral trade agreements – with or without US support.

Ben Horton leads the Common Futures Conversations project, which develops new online formats for political dialogue between young people in Africa and Europe. Alongside this he manages the digital strategy of the Chatham House journal, International Affairs, and co-hosts the Chatham House podcast, Undercurrents.

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Our excess-mortality model suggests that 8m-16m people have died in the pandemic. The central estimate is 14m. The developing world is vulnerable to the virus, especially lower-middle-income countries where remote working is rare and plenty of people are fat and old. If you strip out China, non-rich countries have 68% of the world’s population but 87% of its deaths. Only 5% of those aged over 12 are fully vaccinated.

Alongside the human cost is an economic bill, since emerging markets have less room to spend their way out of trouble. Medium-term gdp forecasts for all emerging economies are in aggregate 5% lower than before the virus struck. People are angry and, even though protesting during a pandemic is risky, violent demonstrations around the world are more common than at any time since 2008.

Rich places, such as America and Britain, are no strangers to incompetence and turmoil. But disappointment has hit emerging economies especially hard. In the early 2000s they buzzed with talk of “catch-up”: the idea that poorer countries could prosper by absorbing foreign technology, investing in manufacturing and opening up their economies to trade, as a handful of East Asian tiger economies had done a generation earlier. Wall Street coined the term brics to celebrate Brazil, Russia, India and China—the world economy’s new superstars.

For a while, catch-up worked. The proportion of countries where the level of economic output per head was growing faster than in America rose from 34% in the 1980s to 82% in the 2000s. The implications were momentous. Poverty fell. Multinational companies pivoted away from the boring old West. In geopolitics catch-up promised a new multipolar world in which power was more evenly distributed.

This golden age now looks as if it has come to a premature end. In the 2010s the share of countries catching up fell to 59%. China has defied many doomsayers and there have been quieter Asian success stories such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia. But Brazil and Russia have let down the brics and, as a whole, Latin America, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa are falling further behind the rich world. Even emerging Asia is catching up more slowly than it was.

Bad luck has played a part. The commodity boom of the 2000s fizzled out, global trade stagnated after the financial crisis and bouts of exchange-rate turbulence caused turmoil. But so has complacency as countries have come to think that fast growth was preordained. In many places basic services such as education and health care have been neglected. Crippling problems have been left unfixed, including South Africa’s idle power plants, India’s rotten banks and Russia’s corruption. Instead of defending liberal institutions, such as central banks and the courts, politicians have used them for their own gain.

What happens next? One risk is an emerging-market economic crisis as interest rates in America rise. Fortunately most emerging economies are less brittle than they were, because they have floating exchange rates and rely less on foreign-currency debt. Long-running political crises are a bigger worry. Research suggests that protests suppress the economy, which leads to further discontent—and that the effect is more marked in emerging markets.

Even if emerging economies avoid chaos, the legacy of covid-19 and rising protectionism could condemn them to a long period of slower growth. Many of their people will remain unvaccinated until well into 2022. Long-term productivity could be lowered as a result of so many children having missed school.

Trade may also become harder. China is turning inward, away from the broadly open policies that made it richer. If that continues, China will never be the vast source of consumer demand for the poor world that America has been for China in recent decades.

The West’s increasing protectionism will also limit export opportunities for foreign producers which, in any case, will be less advantageous as manufacturing becomes less labour-intensive. Unfortunately, rich countries are unlikely to make up for it by liberalising trade in services, which would open up other paths to growth. And they may fail to help exposed economies such as Bangladesh—a success story—adapt to climate change.

Faced with this grim landscape, emerging markets may themselves be tempted to abandon open trade and investment. That would be a grave error. An unforgiving global environment makes it even more important for them to stick to policies that work. Turkey’s notion that raising interest rates causes inflation has been disastrous; Venezuela’s pursuit of socialism has been ruinous; and banning foreign firms from adding customers, as India just has with Mastercard, is self-defeating. When catching up is hard, those emerging markets which stay open will have the best chance.

Catch up, don’t give up

Some rules have changed: universal access to digital technologies is now vital, as is an adequate social safety-net. But the principles of how to get rich remain the same today as they ever were. Stay open to trade, compete in global markets and invest in infrastructure and education. Before the liberal reforms of recent decades, economies were diverging. There is time yet to avoid a return to the needless hardship of old.

To read the full commentary from The Economist, please click here. 

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Change is happening as West African countries work together to ‘pool’ their power systems for better use and sharing of cheaper, greener energy resources available right in the neighborhood. The region has significant natural energy resources, namely, hydropower, gas, and wind mostly along the coast and solar power – especially in the Sahel region. The West African Power Pool (WAPP), established in 1999, expects to interconnect the 14 mainland countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) by the middle of the decade and bring to fruition a self-reliant regional power market that delivers abundant affordable electricity to all.

Across the region, the economic benefits of the regional power market are evaluated at up to US$665 million per year, with the average cost of electricity generation expected to fall by between a quarter and a third. Over the past 10 years, the World Bank has financed close to US$2.3 billion of investments in transmission infrastructure, and institutional capacity in support of the WAPP.  

But hardware and institutions alone do not make a market. For actual trade to happen, neighbors must have confidence in each other and in the flow of commodities and payments. Despite progress, market confidence remains shaky as some countries balk at the lumpy capital investments and long lead times needed to develop new WAPP-dependent infrastructure. Others suffer from financially distressed national utilities whose creditworthiness and ability to trade may be called into question. These and other factors have caused some would-be importer countries to continue to rely on their own expensive small-scale electricity generation instead of shifting their sights and investment priorities toward least-cost options from neighboring exporter countries.     

The World Bank and other partners are helping countries overcome the financial barriers but changing mindsets and instilling trust in the market have required a new focus on regional cooperation in domestic policies.

An important step forward was the adoption of the ECOWAS Directive on the Securitization of Cross-Border Power Trade in December 2018. This regional reform program aims to increase confidence in the enforcement of commercial agreements, to encourage least-cost investment decisions that promote regional options and competition, and to promote transparency on the creditworthiness of national power utilities and on key investment decisions that may impact demand and supply across the market. It calls for national policies and reforms that, if implemented collectively across the region, will lead to sustained trade and thus investment decisions that lower costs.  

Funding from the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP) supported the directive’s preparation, and the Bank is now helping to operationalize it through the $300 million West Africa Regional Energy Trade Development Policy Financing (DPF) in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Like other DPFs issued by the Bank, this one provides governments with fast general budget support in exchange for a pre-agreed program of institutional and policy reforms referred to as “prior actions.” Unlike other DPFs, this one marks the Bank’s first multi-country DPF operation using the Regional IDA window –[IDA is the International Development Association, the branch of the World Bank Group that supports poor countries]– and a joint matrix of policy and institutional actions. Not surprisingly, there has been a learning curve. Three important lessons have emerged so far:

1. Start with joint agreements among high-level decision makers. Early in the process (and pre-pandemic), we were able to get all the Ministers of Finance and Ministers of Energy from all six countries in one room to mutually agree on the prior actions needed to build trust in trade. This has meant that sector ministries have found it hard to back out of difficult, but necessary, prior actions required of them.
2. Design prior actions in a manner that is resilient to events. The structural measures put in place to regularize payments from Mali to Côte d’Ivoire were simple transparent mechanisms designed to limit opportunities for interference, and were unaffected by the August 2020 coup d’état in Mali, even while the West Africa Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) closed normal flow of funds with Mali.
3. Remain flexible to keep on track. The COVID-19 pandemic and continuing political instabilities in Mali delayed the DPF’s effectiveness, but we did not let these forces blow us off course. We continued to work with countries bilaterally (and virtually), and the DPF was able to launch in February 2021 with all countries fully on board.

We are encouraged by this initial progress, but deep complexities remain in knitting together the region’s power systems. Most recently, unforeseen supply shortages curtailed exports from Côte d’Ivoire to Mali and Burkina Faso. Several interconnectors under construction will eventually alleviate such shortages, as countries will be able to import from different sources in the region. Regulatory reforms backed by the DPF will further increase trade connections and confidence. Transformation at this scale takes time, but as it happens, the West Africa region will be more self-reliant, greener, and more able to cope with shocks. Together, we remain committed to achieving affordable and reliable electricity for all.   

Mustafa Zakir Hussain advises senior levels of government on policies to advance major infrastructure service delivery while controlling fiscal deficits and advancing national and global de-carbonization objectives. During 2018-21, he led dialogue in a number of countries in West Africa to reduce the fiscal burden of the energy sectors – including leading the Bank’s landmark 6-country Regional Energy Trade Development Policy Financing operation to advance affordability, resilience and de-carbonization in the region’s energy use.

His over 15-year career at the Bank has also covered Eastern and Southern Africa, South Asia, East Asia Pacific, the Balkans and North Africa. He has worked on many aspects of infrastructure service delivery – including economic regulation, output-based financing, project finance and guarantees – and polices to increase competition and improve governance around key investment decisions. A major sector focus has been on energy transition. Beyond infrastructure, he has led national multi-sector budget support operations and worked on the Bank’s operational policies and corporate agenda.

To read the full commentary from World Bank Blogs, please click here. 

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To understand how COVID-19 has affected global trade in, and production of, vaccines, and to get a sense of where the main capacities to produce COVID-19 vaccines at scale might be found, we looked at global vaccine trade prior to the pandemic and estimated production worldwide, with two main results. First, pre-pandemic, the EU was the world’s largest producer of vaccines. Second, the pre-pandemic market for vaccine was divided into two spheres: rich countries are supplied by EU and US production capacity (with the latter mostly producing for itself), while India was the main producer for developing countries. China produced almost exclusively for its own market.

Evidence since the start of the pandemic indicates that, while broadly COVID-19 has not changed these production patterns, there have been modifications. China has become a major supplier of COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries, using its vaccines as political leverage and benefitting from the fact that the US has yet to export its production, while India has stated explicitly that it will prioritise its own population. In this context, with its substantial production capacity, the EU will play a major role as a global COVID-19 vaccine supplier as the world continues to tackle the pandemic.

The global vaccine trade pre-pandemic

Figure 1 shows the biggest vaccine exporters pre-pandemic (2017-2019). The EU27 as a bloc (ignoring intra-EU trade) was by far the largest exporter of vaccines to the world, both in terms of volumes (44% of total global exports) and value (60.3%). The larger share of value compared to volume indicates that the EU exported relatively more to markets where it could supply at higher prices, ie high-income countries (HICs). Figure 2 shows this: while the EU supplied 60% of the vaccines imported by HICs, it only supplied 12% of the vaccines imported by low-income countries (LICs). The US and the United Kingdom were the major revenue markets for the EU’s vaccines exports, representing 43.4% and 16.7% respectively of total EU revenues from export of vaccines. Taken together, LICs provided only 1.2% of EU revenues from vaccine exports (7.4% from lower-middle income countries, so 8.6% for LICs and lower-middle income countries), but absorbed 3.9% of volumes exported from the EU (33.2% for lower-middle income countries).

With a share of 22%, the US was the second largest exporter in value terms (though only one third of the EU size). But like the EU, the US pre-pandemic mostly exported to other HICs: it represented only 2% of volumes imported by LICs (Figure 2). For India, the opposite was the case. While India was the second-largest vaccine exporter in terms of volumes (24.7% of total global exports) it represented barely more than 2% of vaccines exports in terms of value. This huge discrepancy is linked to the fact that India exported virtually only to LICs, representing 80% of their vaccine imports by volume (Figure 2).

These trade patterns reflect a highly segmented market for vaccines, with HICs representing the bulk of revenues, while LICs represent the bulk of volumes. High-income producers (EU, US) sell vaccines to high-income countries, while India provides vaccines to low-income countries. This notable market segmentation is associated with the licensing practices of the pharmaceutical industry.

The largest life sciences companies by vaccine revenues are: GSK, Merck, Sanofi and Pfizer, which represent about 90% of global vaccine revenues. They license their patents to producers in LICs to produce and sell to LICs, reserving HIC markets for their own production or dedicated HIC licensees. In particular, the Serum Institute of India plays an outsized role as a licensee, supplying vaccines to low-income countries.

Estimating vaccine production capacities

To get a full picture of global vaccines supply patterns before the pandemic, we looked not only at the trade flows, but also at production capacities. In the absence of official data on global vaccine production, we estimated countries’ production volumes from the available trade data. For this, we first estimated internal demand. We looked at countries that are not producers (ie countries that export virtually no vaccines). For these countries, we assumed that their total demand for vaccines is equal to their imports. This gives a sense of what the ‘consumption’-based demand for vaccines is. Based on this approach, we provide a range of estimates. We computed the average imports per capita of non-producing countries and used this to compute demand for all countries. We also looked at the relationship between imports per capita and a ‘vaccine index’ based on the demographics and immunisation rates in the same non-producing countries. We computed estimates both with and without income-level segmentation by country. We then derived production estimates per country as the sum of our estimates of their demand and their net exports.

All estimates produce similar results and give a good sense of the scale of production volumes across the world. Table 1 sets out our estimated production volumes per country. Taken as a whole, the EU is the world’s largest producer of vaccines, closely followed by India, with estimates of around 15.5 million and 14.5 million kilogrammes of vaccines produced yearly, respectively. China with production in the realm of 8 million to 12 million kilogrammes comes in third place. The United States is in fourth place, but with considerably smaller production volumes of 4.5-5.2 million kilogrammes. Other countries with considerable vaccine production capacity are Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Russia. No African or Latin American country has an estimated production capacity of more than 1 million kilogrammes.

Among vaccine producers, the EU pre-pandemic exported the greatest (estimated) volumes of the vaccines it produced, apart from South Korea, which also has a high export-intensity, but from only a small (estimated) production capacity. China, meanwhile, exported almost no vaccines before COVID-19.

Table 1: Range of estimates of yearly vaccine production (millions of kg, 2017-2019 data)

COVID-19 and the future of vaccine production

While it is tempting to draw conclusions from these numbers about the capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines, there are couple of caveats. First, our data reflects production capacity in ‘normal’ times (2017 to 2019 averages) and for a broad spectrum of vaccines. It is unclear to what extent new capacity has been installed or how much this capacity has been adapted to produce COVID-19 vaccines at the required scale and speed. More importantly, vaccines pre-pandemic were produced with different technologies.

The leading western producers mostly produce vaccines using viral vector and/or protein technology. Older inactivated virus technology is mostly used in LIC production, most notably in China. For COVID-19, the two Chinese vaccines approved by the World Health Organisation use inactivated virus technology, while vaccines from Astra Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson use viral vector technology (this includes the Serum Institute, which licenses Astra Zeneca vaccines for supply to LICs). However, the vaccines from BioNTech and Moderna use a novel mRNA technology. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was unclear how much of the established vaccine production capacity could be quickly activated for COVID-19 vaccine production, particularly for the novel mRNA vaccines.

Data on COVID-19 vaccine production from Airfinity, a small private firm that specialises in COVID-19 data, shows the similarities and differences compared to the pre-pandemic situation (Figure 3). The biggest producers of COVID-19 vaccines are the same as the biggest vaccine producers before the pandemic (China, the US, the EU and India), but the ranking has changed.

A significant change can be observed in China’s vaccine policy. While China exported hardly any vaccines before the pandemic, it is now the largest exporter of COVID-19 vaccines. Chinese vaccines are mainly exported to a handful of LICs in central and South-East Asia, South America and North Africa. The US, meanwhile, is yet to export any COVID-19 vaccine, as it has prioritised vaccinating its own population first. India, which pre-pandemic was the main exporter of vaccines to LICs and could be a pivotal country for meeting LIC demand, is exporting but redirecting its capacity in order to meet local demand. Russia’s Sputnik V viral vector vaccine has received a lot of media attention, but Russia, although it is exporting more than usual, only plays a minor role in volume terms.

Figure 3: Production and exports of COVID-19 vaccines

Overall, the evidence shows that high-income vaccine producers (US, EU) have, in the pandemic, continued to produce for high-income countries (though the US currently produces only for itself). In the light of our data, it is unsurprising that keeping global vaccine markets open was less of a priority for the US than the EU, given the much greater pre-pandemic export intensity of EU vaccine production.

However, for LICs, India’s apparent big step back during the pandemic from its role of exporter could be bad news. Until now, India has been the major supplier to LICs. Interestingly, China (and Russia, to a smaller degree) has seized the opportunity to increase production and exports to LICs.

Outlook

The pressing question currently is how to increase the volume of COVID-19 vaccines available to the world and, more specifically, to low-income countries. The developing world until now has relied on India for vaccines. Can other suppliers and countries scale up in the face of India’s retrenchment in the face of the devastating COVID-19 wave in India in spring 2021? China has significantly increased its capacity and now exports massively to low-income countries, but will be constrained by the willingness of countries to take up China’s vaccines, which use the older inactivated virus technology. Even if the US changes policy and exports more of its unused capacity, this capacity is not so sizeable.

While much hope has been invested in patent waivers to increase production in LICs, it is unclear if such a policy will work in the short term, given how little experience producers have with mRNA vaccines (making even voluntary licensing deals difficult). Even for vaccines based on the old inactivated vaccine or viral vector technologies, further transfers of production know-how are needed.

This leaves the EU as the main supplier to the world, given its capacity to produce at scale the most sought-after COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, EU producers have a legacy of exporting, though mainly intra-EU or to other HICs. In the medium-term, partnerships with emerging markets will remain absolutely essential. Notable is the EU’s initiative to support the creation of vaccine production in Africa, including through mRNA manufacturing. In addition, since developing markets are not served by European manufacturers in the first place, there is little risk of harming EU industry.

Lionel Guetta-Jeanrenaud is working at Bruegel as a Research Assistant. He studied economics at the Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, in France. Before joining Bruegel, Lionel worked as a research assistant at the Department of Economics of Harvard University.

Niclas Poitiers, a German citizen, joined Bruegel as a research fellow in September 2019. Niclas’ research interests include international trade, international macroeconomics and the digital economy. He is working on topics on e-commerce in trade as well as European trade policy in global trade wars. Furthermore he is interested in topics on income inequality and welfare state policies.

Prof Dr. Reinhilde Veugelers is a full professor at KULeuven (BE) at the Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation.  She is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel since 2009.  She is also a CEPR Research Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and of the Academia Europeana. From 2004-2008, she was on academic leave, as advisor at the European Commission (BEPA Bureau of European Policy Analysis).  She served on the ERC Scientific Council from 2012-2018 and on the RISE Expert Group advising the commissioner for Research.  She is a member of VARIO, the expert group advising the Flemish minister for Innovation. She is currently a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science and a co-PI on the Science of Science Funding Initiative at NBER.

To read the full commentary from Bruegel, please click here. 

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The supply chain for joint operations serves a joint force. However, military services, geographic combatant commanders, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), and other combat support agencies make independent decisions about the purchase and positioning of spares and ordnance. All these organizations have different responsibilities and incentives. These incentives drive behavior that makes individual sense for the organizations, but might not result in overall effectiveness in supporting the needs of operating forces.

Due largely to the unprecedented level of dominance and freedom of action the United States possessed after the Cold War, logistics planners moved away from a focus on effectiveness to a focus on efficiency, in the sense that little is left idle for significant periods and that commodities are delivered at minimum cost. This is not to say that efficiency is not a worthy goal, just that it relies very heavily on measurements of current activity. This has meant that such factors as planning for attrition or dispersion or consideration of resupply points became matters of cost, with a bias toward “just in time” delivery that is simply not executable in the world as it has evolved.

If evaluated solely against meeting steady-state demand, the military operational supply chain works as it should. The problem is not performance relative to incentives. Rather, the problem is that the existing guidance does not lead the system to conduct analyses and make decisions needed to support the highly demanding combat operations likely in a conflict with a major power. As a result, the ability of this system to properly support the joint force in the event of major conflict is at best untested and could be highly problematic.

Distribution is not, however, the area of greatest concern when we discuss defense-related supply chains. The Department of Defense has begun assessing the physical vulnerability of supply chains and is taking effort to mitigate the problems. However, the larger problem is that the nation’s industrial base has shifted in ways that make resupply of some key components highly questionable during periods of crisis and heightened operational tempo, with war being the most radical of these conditions.

Typically, the focus here is on weapon systems and ordnance, and these indeed are items of concern. No other customer exists for these except the U.S. Department of Defense and keeping an adequate industrial base for surge requires what amounts to an outright subsidy. But, industrial base shortfalls and likely shortages in the event of heightened operational tempo extend beyond the specialized world of munitions. Spare parts are another area of concern. Multiple organizations play roles in production, stocking, and ultimate distribution of spare parts.

DLA is the wholesale supplier for most consumable spare parts. Each of the services funds DLA via a working capital fund mechanism to purchase and maintain these stocks. DLA is directed to meet broad steady-state Materiel Availability targets at minimal cost. It has automated inventory algorithms that are set up to make decisions for individual parts based on optimizing against the overall metrics. Thus, DLA has an incentive to invest little in expensive parts that have infrequent demands, even when they are key readiness drivers.

Services can choose to invest in “readiness spares” that are critical even if not in heavy demand, but they must choose to prioritize these over every other demand on their resources. They have as a result a considerable incentive to simply defer purchases in the belief that the shortages can be addressed in wartime. The result is that parts inventory is oriented toward a peace-time steady state rather than the higher operational tempo likely in war time or periods of crisis. There is, however, no particular reason to believe that suppliers will be able to rapidly ramp up production to meet wartime demand. Indeed, the dimensions of demand are not fully understood nor are the capacities of the industrial base.

We, fortunately, do not have multiple examples of the system failing to meet demand, but this is largely because the occasion under which such failure is likely to happen—large-scale conflict against a peer competitor—has not occurred in recent decades. If it were to occur, the system is very likely to encounter significant difficulty in meeting wartime demands, creating risks of successful execution of combat operations.

Bradley Martin is the director of the RAND National Security Supply Chain Institute, and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Martin retired from the Navy as a surface warfare Captain after 30 years service, including four command tours.

In addition to his operational tours, he served on the staff of U.S. Forces Japan, the OPNAV staff as an operations analyst, and most recently as the Navy coordinator for participation in Joint Staff and OSD requirements and resources forums. His subspecialties included operations research, operational logistics, and strategic planning. Prior to joining the Navy, he achieved a doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan, while working as a research assistant for the Correlates of War Project.

To read the full commentary from the Research and Development Corporation (RAND), please click here. 

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Although it did not materialize because of lack of sufficient support, a major political figure in the country, Mr. Andargachew Tsige, had called an impromptu meeting and appealed to his supporters to “come out in millions and burn the US flag” to oppose the Biden administration. (Andargachew once claimed to have authored the roadmap for Ethiopia’s transition and is believed to be the key link between the Ethiopian Prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, and the Eritrean President, Isaias Afeworki.) Judging by the reactions of the various officials of the Ethiopian government, Addis Ababa appears to be seriously concerned about the implications of the new US policy, and rightly so.

The key argument that members and supporters of the Ethiopian regime are invoking in their opposition to the new US policy is the Westphalian conception of state sovereignty, which reinforces the strongly held view in some circles in the country that Ethiopia is an exceptional state, in whose internal affairs outsiders are not welcomed to meddle. Alluding to these sentiments, Mr. Abiy has referred to the US in a recent public event as a “young nation without history”, revealing the kind of thinking that might have led his country into a ruinous civil war. It appears that the young and gaudy leader might have expected that the US foreign policy establishment would continue to afford the Ethiopian government significant deference – as in the past – regardless of how it conducted its internal affairs.

The view that Ethiopia is an exceptional state – as professed by a segment of the Ethiopian political class – has serious detractors. The narrative that it is a country consisting of unequal nations, which had been cobbled together through imperial annexation by the Amhara ruling class only in the last century and half, has gained significant ground under the leadership of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Arguably, the wars in Tigray, Oromia, and Benishangul are driven by Abiy’s apparent determination to reverse course and reimpose a view of Ethiopia that is cherished by the unitarist political camp.

More importantly, it is difficult to reconcile the image of Ethiopia as an exceptional country that nurtures its sovereignty, with the harsh economic reality it is facing. It remains dependent on foreign aid to meet some of the basic needs of its population. The US, its western allies, and the multilateral institutions in which they are important stakeholders send billions of dollars to Ethiopia every year, most of which is allocated as a budget support to the government.

Of the $13 billion dollars or so promised by the World Bank to Ethiopia for the current three-year period, nearly half of the funds had been earmarked for workers’ salaries in the five pro-poor sectors identified by the Bank, under the moniker of human development. The World Bank is just one of about twenty-seven countries and agencies funding Ethiopia’s pro-poor sectors (the sectors include education, health, agriculture, water, and social protections), endeavoring to contribute to economic development in the country. Ethiopia’s education sector alone receives over $1 billion every year from these sources, with World Bank’s share constituting less than half of the transfers.

Ethiopia is also heavily dependent on the planned – now uncertain – restructuring of its debt by the International Monetary Fund, without which it will be in default on the external debt it has accumulated over the years due to the persistent deficits in its balance of payment. Currently, the country’s international reserve can finance imports only for the next month and half. For all intents and purposes, therefore, Ethiopia is looking at the abyss in terms of economic activities, without the promised debt restructuring by the IMF.

Under these dire circumstances, the claim that a rational recalibration of their policies by the US and the other donor nations – to induce the Ethiopian government to hold an all-inclusive and meaningful dialogue with the federalist camp –   amounts to infringing on the sovereign rights of an independent state, does not make much sense. Unless being an “exceptional country” means dependence on the generosity of others for survival, it is difficult to reconcile the rhetoric coming from Addis Ababa with the difficult economic realities the country is facing.

Additionally, the sovereignty argument rings hollow, when one considers that Ethiopia is on the verge of collapse, posing serious risks and threats to millions of innocent human lives, regional stability, and World peace.  Although he came into office primarily through a popular protest movement – also known as the Oromo Protests – Mr. Abiy did not waste any time in ditching the largely peaceful movement and to hitching his political wagon with forces whose main mission was to undo the social and political changes that had transpired in the country when the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) was at the helm.

Working in concert with the Eritrean regime, Abiy’s government has instituted policies and initiatives that have put millions of lives at risk, and it is overseeing a devastating civil war on many fronts – with the war in Tigray capturing international attention largely due to its intensity, and insurgencies in Oromia and Benishangul gaining significant momentum in the last three years. Ethiopia today is “tense, deeply conflicted, dangerous, and bitterly contested by warring factions”, taking a giant leap towards becoming a failed state, thus quickly turning into a real danger to its people and international peace.

If the dangerous political course Addis Ababa is pursuing continues along its current trajectory, it has a potential of turning the Horn of Africa into an ungovernable mess, with seriously adverse implications to the international community.  Under these circumstances, the call by Western powers (who will be called upon to bear some of the cost of the war) for an all-Inclusive dialogue – to try to solve Ethiopia’s age-old political problems – is the least they can do. Great powers have from time to time led international efforts (including and up to conducting overseas military operations) to protect their geo-political interests and to save innocent human lives; therefore, the recent policy initiatives being undertaken by the US and its European allies with respect to the conflicts in Ethiopia are to be expected from responsible global leaders.

What Abiy and co. are framing as US’s intervention in Ethiopia’s internal affairs – invoking a Westphalian notion of state sovereignty and appealing to a diminishing sentiment among Ethiopians (Ethiopia’s dubious exceptional status) – can be understood rather as a concerted effort by the Biden administration to avert a potentially disastrous collapse of the Ethiopian state. The Western world, whose counsel the Ethiopian prime minister seems to have rejected, had considered him a worthy partner who could lead the effort to bring about the long-sought democracy and development in the country, likely facilitating his meteoric rise to power.

A contemporary phenomenon that the promoters of centralized Ethiopian state are also neglecting (in their rush to justify a brutal war that has victimized millions of people) and much of the Western world has been seeking to come to terms with, is “the global resurgence of cultural and religious pluralism … the quest for cultural authenticity and civilizational states” in the modern age. International Relations scholars are recommending to policy makers in the West to be thoughtfully cognizant of these developments while rearticulating their foreign policies to meet the challenges of the emerging multipolar world.

The current civil war in Ethiopia has been characterized as a manifestation of the contestation between unitary political forces that subscribe to Ethiopian exceptionalism as an ideology, and others that aim to promote cultural and linguistic pluralism in the country. The Tigray people are proud custodians of the Aksumite civilization, and it is very difficult to see them as part of Ethiopia where their identity is suppressed, and their collective destiny is determined by the central government in Addis Ababa. Similarly, the Oromo are reclaiming their Gadaa civilization – an indigenous democratic socio-political system recently inscribed by UNESCO as an intangible human heritage, which was suppressed for over a century along with the other important markers of their identity – and it would be unrealistic to expect them to buy into Mr. Abiy’s vision of Greater Ethiopia, where the Amhara identity becomes the dominant norm, once again.

Whereas thoughtful world leaders are cognizant of these developments and fine tuning their policies to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, Mr. Abiy and his regional partners appear to be stuck in the past – on the principle of state sovereignty that was designed in Europe to overcome the challenges of a different era, and is increasingly being viewed as a flawed principle of international law for the modern times we live in – to push the political agenda, and maintain the cultural hegemony, of the Amhara over all other social groups in the country.   

Viewed from these perspectives, it is not entirely surprising that the Biden foreign policy team is rising to the challenge and sending a clear signal that it will not be deterred from pursuing a rational foreign policy objective in Ethiopia, regardless of a legalistic interpretation of current law pertaining to state sovereignty. It must be applauded and supported for initiating a policy change and processes that aim to hold the Ethiopian regime and its associates accountable for their gross and unacceptable violations of human rights.

Teferi Mergo is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, with joint appointments at St. Paul’s College and the department of Economics. He is a Research Fellow at the Global Labor Organization – and he has been recognized for excellence in research at the University of Waterloo.

To read the original commentary from Global Policy, please visit here

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Biden left Washington for his first trip abroad on a mission to rally partners to work together, “demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age.” These challenges include the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis—on both of which G7 leaders failed to be truly ambitious—as well as the need to “[confront] the harmful activities of the governments of China and Russia.”

The atmosphere at the G7 was of determination to show leadership and of warmth among leaders—with the exception of the host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was under pressure from pretty much everyone to avoid a trade war with the EU over the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Brexit yet again tainted the unity of the West.

Of these summits, the U.S.-EU appointment today, June 15, is the least glamorous and the most under-reported. Yet it is the first summit between the two sides since 2014 and the first test of what can be achieved through U.S.-EU cooperation.

It is clear that the United States’ new method is to work with its partners to forward its goals, starting with containing China’s expansion. What has received less elaboration are its goals with regard to Europe.

Biden had warm words for the EU as “strong and vibrant,” but the details of what the two can do together are yet to emerge.

Key positions relevant to Europe also are awaiting appointments, such as the U.S. ambassadors to NATO and the EU.

The EU, on the other hand, has been quite disciplined on the transatlantic agenda, showing that it has learned a few lessons from the recent past.

First of all, EU leaders have avoided squabbling to get the first photo shot with Joe Biden, the first invitation to the White House—it will be Angela Merkel in July—, and gracefully accepted that the EU institutions would be the first port of call after NATO and G7.

Secondly, they have been remarkably united in their public messaging and avoided trumpeting unrealistic wishlists or grandstanding big ideas.

Thirdly, the EU has been quietly but proactively working on a bilateral agenda to translate good intentions into practical steps and deeds. This is not news headline material, but it displays a more mature approach to the transatlantic relationship.

What then to expect of the EU-U.S. summit?

Today’s summit will echo some of the commitments made by leaders at the G7 on ending the pandemic and supporting all countries in investing in a green economy. But the flesh on the bones is to be found in what the EU and the United States decide to pursue bilaterally.

Back in December the EU had proposed to create an EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC). This is likely to be one of the most significant deliverables of today’s summit. There are multiple reasons why this decision is important. Two stand out.

Firstly, it represents a practical response to the United States’ call to cooperate on the challenges posed by China, a politically controversial quest from the European perspective, where views on China differ from those of the United States and among EU members. Deconstructing the challenges posed by China will help EU member states deal with specific issues rather than accept the overarching narrative of democracy versus authoritarianism that the Biden administration is embracing.

Secondly, it will provide a semi-institutionalized space for dialogue through which the EU and the United States can reach constructive consensus but also manage their differences, which are many, complex, and require the mobilization of several departments of government, which is complicated in itself.

A commitment to greater systematic cooperation on a wider range of international issues is also likely to emerge from the summit. The EU-U.S. dialogue on China is seen as a positive initiative and the precedent of the EU, United States, UK, and Canada coordinating sanctions against China for the treatment of the Uighur minority earlier this year also speaks in favor of more regular and institutionalized dialogue. It could provide a format relevant to other issues, such as coordinating positions on dealing with Russia.

Then there are things to watch out for.

The TTC and, potentially, an EU-U.S. dialogue on Russia in the mold of the existing dialogue on China are ways for the EU to respond to Washington’s call for action on China and Russia. The broader narrative framing global politics as a struggle between authoritarianism and democracy is much harder for the EU as a whole to embrace.

There have been significant shifts in the EU’s views of China during the past couple of years, part at the urging of the United States, part as a growing realization that China’s economic and financial investments in the European continent have the political objectives of sowing divisions and building vulnerabilities to and dependencies on China, and part as a result of Beijing’s wolf warrior diplomacy, which has taken an explicitly aggressive turn since the coronavirus pandemic.

Yet views in the EU on the democracy versus authoritarian paradigm differ widely—from countries that are firm transatlanticists but are abandoning democracy domestically to those whose democracies are thriving but which are deeply interconnected with the Chinese economy and/or Russian energy.

Hesitancy about the United States also continues to hover over the constructive agenda and the optimism that will come out of today’s summit.

The EU is painfully aware that the window of opportunity for the transatlantic reset could be narrow and must prepare for the eventuality that after 2024 it might be left out in the cold—again. The union needs to simultaneously build back better with the United States and on its own.

Rosa Balfour is director of Carnegie Europe. Her fields of expertise include European politics, institutions, and foreign and security policy.

To read the original commentary from Carnegie Europe, please visit here.

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The United States, along with allies and partners, imposed sanctions and export restrictions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its election interference, and attempts on the lives of regime opponents. The sanctions are likely to be a topic of discussion during President Joe Biden’s summit with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on June 16 in Geneva.

To mitigate the impact of the sanctions, Moscow pursued a policy of import substitutionto offset losing access to vital components for its civilian and military manufacturing sectors. For instance, Russia was reliant on Ukrainian manufacturers like Motor Sich and Zorya-Mashproekt for marine and aircraft engines. These companies not only provided key inputs for Russia’s own military capabilities, but also for those systems that Russia exported to other nations.

Russia’s attempts to substitute domestic production for previously imported technologies have been delayed and in many cases have fallen short. The main problem with Russia’s import substitution program is its inability to acquire high-tech machine tools (PDF)from Western suppliers for industrial production.

Subsidiaries of Russia’s United Engine Corporation (UEC) pursued development of advanced marine engines to replace those previously imported from Zorya-Mashproekt but have faced various difficulties. Many of these issues are symptoms of larger problems in the Russian military-industrial complex. For example, Moscow made the decision to write-off debt held by UEC, United Aircraft Corporation, and United Shipbuilding Corporation as a result of years of financial issues and mismanagement. The extent to which the Russian government can continue to prop up the defense industrial base is not clear. Putin has stated recently that renationalization of the industry is one possible path the government could pursue.

What is clear is that the termination of the Russian defense industrial relationship with Ukraine has had cascading effects for Russia’s arms exports. Russia was negotiating deals with both India and Vietnam to export naval vessels, but both prospective sales have encountered problems. In the case of Vietnam, negotiations are currently stalled for lack of engines. India, in contrast, had to acquire marine engines directly from Ukraine in early 2021, separate from Russia, for installation on the vessels. India has separately pursued joint production of marine turbine engines with Rolls-Royce. These workarounds do not bode well for future Russian arms sales.

Recently, Russian officials announced that production for a civil aircraft had been stalled due to Western sanctions. Russia has also used its intelligence services to assist in the pursuit of aircraft engine development. In April, the FBI added an intelligence officer for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, who was working as a UEC executive, to its most-wanted list for allegedly conspiring to steal trade secrets from a Western aerospace company.

Further harming Russian aircraft development and production is the rise of China’s defense industry. Increasingly, China has transitioned from, and even replaced, Russian engines with its own domestically-built ones. The rise of China and other new competitors in the international arms market may challenge Russia’s transition to greater indigenous production because its military-industrial complex partially relies on export orders to sustain itself.

Russia tried to address its engine production challenge by purchasing a Norwegian marine engine facility. For a variety of reasons, Norway’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security announcedin March that it had blocked the sale of Bergen Engines, which produces and maintains marine engines for Norwegian intelligence vessels. The Norwegian facility has been owned by Rolls-Royce for years, but it has struggled to turn a profit. Importantly, the international conglomerate seeking to buy the Norwegian facility was Russia’s Transmashholding, which is not a sanctioned entity like UEC. It is listed neither on the Office of Foreign Asset Control’s Specially Designated Nationals nor its Sectoral Sanctions Identifications List (PDF).

Nevertheless, the Norwegian government stated it blocked the sale due to national security concerns. Norway’s Ministry of Justice highlighted how the sale would have benefitted Russia’s defense industry and that permitting the sale could have allowed it to circumvent Western sanctions. The Norwegian government, as a founding NATO member, did not believe the immediate economic benefits of Bergen Engines’ sale outweighed the security risks inherent in providing military naval engines to its aggressive neighbor.

Like Norway, many countries around the globe are on high alert for Russia’s provocative actions. Norway stood up to Russia and put its security and that of its allies and partners ahead of potential short-term economic benefit. This is an example other countries might follow.

To read the full commentary from The RAND Corporation, please click here.

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