Growth has held up better in Egypt than in neighbouring countries until recently but inflation has reached very high levels and financing conditions have tightened along with foreign currency shortages. In this context, Egypt is stepping up economic reform efforts.

Growth has rebounded from the pandemic and the energy crisis, despite the 2023 earthquake and droughts. Morocco has benefitted from a stable macroeconomic regime and the deficit is narrowing following the pandemic and energy crisis with the government debt ratio is around 70% of GDP. Morocco has embarked on major reforms to encourage investment and to extend health insurance and social protection, but a stronger convergence path will be needed to achieve the vision in the New Development Model. Morocco’s labour productivity gap with the frontier remains large, although it has narrowed. FDI flows have been strong, but domestic private investment is low, and Moroccan firms face obstacles in performing better. Morocco’s young population is an asset, but the labour market suffers from high youth unemployment and low female employment. Emigration is significant. Widespread informality leads to low wages, poor-quality jobs and weak skills. Morocco has made an ambitious commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2010 and to net zero by 2050, benefiting from the country’s potential for renewables-based generation. The country is vulnerable to climate change and already faces significant water stress. SPECIAL FEATURES: BOOSTING INVESTMENT, FIRM PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY; CREATING MORE AND BETTER JOBS

This is the first Green Growth Policy Review of Egypt. It examines progress towards sustainable development and green growth over the past decade. The 40 recommendations aim to help Egypt improve its environmental performance, giving a special focus to building climate-smart, resilient and inclusive cities.

The report Informality and Structural Transformation in the Middle east and North Africa outlines a framework for assessing the impact of economic and social policies on informality. The framework was developed jointly by the ILO, OECD and UNDP, and is thought as a hands-on instrument, allowing policy makers to foresee early on in the policymaking cycles the effects diverse economic and social policies could have on the informal economy.

This country review explores the state of implementation of the OECD AI Principles in Egypt by providing a mapping of Egypt’s AI governance and policy implementation through gap analysis, comparative analysis, and benchmarking. It highlights key findings and recommendations to strengthen Egypt’s AI ecosystem and facilitate the development of inclusive, responsible, and human-centric AI policies and practices that support Egypt’s development agenda and stand the test of time.

The OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2024, Volume 1: Embracing the Technology Frontier provides new insights on key technologies that underpin the digital technology ecosystem and their impacts. Using big data and machine-learning techniques, Volume 1 provides new estimates of the growth rate of the ecosystem’s core – the information and communications technology (ICT) sector.

Women play active roles throughout the fisheries value chain in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, including participating in pre-harvest activities like vessel and gear construction and maintenance, harvest activities both on board fishing vessels and from shore, and post-harvest activities such as sorting, cleaning, processing and marketing the catch, as well as in activities associated with running the fishing business, such as bookkeeping. Furthermore, women are actively engaged throughout the region in fisheries research and fisheries administrations. Despite the wide and varied roles played by women in fisheries, their contributions to the sector are often not captured in official statistics and can therefore go unrecognized, reinforcing existing gender inequalities and potentially leading to inadvertent discrimination. At the same time, a lack of consideration of women working in the sector can also mean that their knowledge and experience is overlooked and not sufficiently profited from. Recognizing the importance of taking the roles, needs and experiences of women into account when addressing social, economic and environmental issues related to the fishing sector, this study aims at narrowing research gaps in the region regarding gender and fisheries, as well as supporting the commitments of Mediterranean and Black Sea countries to promoting gender equality.

Egypt is one of Africa’s industrial heavyweights. Transforming the country's economy to sustain job-rich and sustainable growth are pivotal steps in its march towards prosperity. Today’s search for new development models, accelerated by the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for shifting up a gear in raising Egypt’s industrial capabilities to compete in an industry 4.0 and agro 4.0 landscape. The Production Transformation Policy Review (PTPR) of Egypt uses a forward-looking framework to assess the country's readiness to embrace change. This includes an analysis of the game-changing potential of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and perspectives on agro-food and electronics (i.e. what in Egypt is referred to as part of the engineering sector), as well as identifying priorities for future reforms. This review is the result of government-business dialogue, and benefited from peer learning from Italy and Malaysia. It also resulted from international and multi-stakeholder knowledge sharing through a dedicated Peer Learning Group (PLG) and the OECD Initiative for Policy Dialogue on Global Value Chains, Production Transformation and Development.

The blue economy is a major driver of urban and regional development, creating millions of local jobs in water-dependent sectors such as fisheries, tourism, and shipping. However, it can also contribute to carbon emissions and ecosystem degradation, while its reliance on freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems exposes it to the impacts of climate change. As the places where the blue economy takes place, creates value and provides jobs, cities and regions play a key role in unlocking the potential of a resilient blue economy that preserves the ecosystems that sustain it. Building on a global survey of 80+ cities, regions and basins, this report highlights the costs and benefits of the blue economy at subnational level, shedding light on the link between the blue economy and water security. This analysis provides an overview of the multi-level governance of the blue economy and related gaps. It calls on cities and regions to develop resilient, inclusive, sustainable and circular (RISC-proof) blue economies by establishing the right governance conditions related to policy making, policy coherence and policy implementation. The report concludes with a RISC Assessment Framework that offers a self-evaluation tool for subnational governments.