Université du Sahel

International audience

Abstract This paper investigates how middle-income countries can leverage industrial policies to participate in and upgrade within renewable energy global value chains. We distinguish between deployment and manufacturing chains and examine three sectors, solar photovoltaic, wind, and biomass power, across 12 middle-income countries. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we identify key combinations of national preconditions and industrial policies—demand-side, supply-side and technology-focused—that enable different participation and upgrading trajectories. While participation is widespread in both chains, upgrading is more prominent in deployment, which presents lower entry barriers. In contrast, upgrading in manufacturing requires stronger sectoral knowledge, larger markets, and robust technology policies. Our results offer actionable insights for policymakers, emphasizing how targeted and context-specific industrial policy mixes are essential to seize windows of opportunity in these green global value chains. The study contributes to the literature on value chains and industrial policy by offering new comparative evidence and practical guidance for latecomer economies seeking to build capabilities and competitiveness in the green economy.

Abstract This chapter wrestles with the interface between Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), competition law and access to medicines. It emphasizes the important role that competition law may play, in addition to the internal IP flexibilities, in order to foster access and dissemination of medical products. Of course, competition law could also be considered as a flexibility within the TRIPS agreement. In our analysis, we consider competition law separately given its role in creating competitive markets within which IP products are commercialized. Relying on the recent case law in the EU, in Italy and in South Africa on the application of competition law in the pharmaceutical sector, with a focus on the prohibition of excessive pricing of pharmaceuticals, this paper argues that TRIPS flexibilities are an important regulatory tool to control prices and to foster access to medicines. However, in certain circumstances, IP flexibilities are operational only within a competitive market that is guaranteed by a functioning competition law.

This paper deals with Ellison’s ahistoriographic or counterhistory/ countermemory discourse that narrates the marginality of the African-American community. To craft his ahistoriographic discourse, Ellison uses sequels of the past, and tropes of carcerality and segregation to bring to the fore the process and politics of otherization that have set the African-American community away from linear time and progress. Ellison’s counterhistory or countermemory discourse “revises received American history by inscribing the history of Blacks in America” (252), as Greene argues. Therefore, Ellison’s ahistoriographic discourse is also a discourse of marginality that digs up the archives to rewrite the other side of suppressed and erased American history that America insulates itself within an amnesia that does not acknowledge that kind of history. As the narrator says, “only those events the recorder regards as important” (439) are archived. Ellison plays with history; he narrativizes the received American history (the official historiography), meaning that he assimilates it with mere lies or fiction.

Maternal undernutrition and mortality remain high in several African countries. Key nutrition and health interventions improve maternal and birth outcomes. Evidence is scarce on how to strengthen health systems to ensure pregnant women and newborns are reached with these interventions. We conducted three quasi-experimental nonrandomized Community Based Maternal and Neonatal Health and Nutrition projects in regions of Ethiopia, Senegal, and Kenya to demonstrate how proven nutrition interventions could be integrated into health programs to improve knowledge and practices during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. We evaluated impact on knowledge and practices related to maternal and neonatal care using logistic regression and repeated-measures models with districts as a fixed variable and adjusted for covariates. Combined country analyses show significant positive effects of the intervention on women receiving first antenatal care visit (ANC) during first trimester (OR = 1.44; p < .001), those consuming any iron and folic acid supplement during their latest pregnancy (OR = 1.60; p = .005), those whose <6 months infants were exclusively breastfed (OR = 2.01; p=.003), those whose delivery was facility based (OR = 1.48; p=.031), and those whose postnatal care was facility based (OR = 2.15; p<.001). There was no significant differences between intervention and control groups regarding one or more and four or more ANC visits, women consuming iron and folic acid for ≥90 days, and early initiation of breastfeeding. We conclude that integrating proven nutrition interventions into health programs at community level improved components of access to and use of ANC, delivery services, and postnatal care by women in three African countries.

RésuméDe nombreux pays développés ont récemment décidé d'adopter des systèmes complets de soins de santé de longue durée (SSLT). Outre les explications conventionnelles de ces changements de politique, qui sont basées sur des facteurs nationaux, il conviendrait d'étudier les enseignements que l'on peut tirer de ce qui se passe à l'étranger. Nous nous concentrerons sur le modèle d'assurance sociale des SSLT, et en particulier sur la façon dont le Japon a tiré des leçons de ce qu'avait fait l'Allemagne, et comme la République de Corée a profité de l'expérience du Japon. Nous suggérerons un certain nombre d'approches quant à la façon de considérer les enseignements politiques généraux tirés de l'expérience d'autrui et des échanges internationaux spécialisés.