Hippolyte Fofack, Chief Economist of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank).

CAIRO – In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused Africa’s first recession in 25 years. The sharp tightening of global financial conditions triggered sudden stops in foreign direct investment and massive capital outflows, alongside one of the most dramatic global demand and supply shocks on record. The crisis intensified the continent’s liquidity constraints and compounded its existing macroeconomic management challenges.

The pandemic-induced downturn has also amplified one of Africa’s biggest development challenges: the high cost of “perception premiums.” These premiums reflect the overinflated risks perennially assigned to Africa, irrespective of its improving macroeconomic fundamentals or the global economic environment.

Fortunately, international leaders are finally discussing the problem. At last October’s annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva remarked that the world needs “to concentrate on reducing the perceived and real risk for investing in Africa so we can see this huge availability of financing for the rest of the world trickle down into Africa.”

On May 18, French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called for “fairer financing rules for African economies,” will host an international summit on providing support to spur the region’s recovery. International coordination will be essential to equalize access to development financing and mitigate the risk of a divergent, two-speed global recovery, which threatens to exacerbate the income gap between Africa and other parts of the world.

Galvanized by strong economic performance in countries like Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Ivory Coast, Sub-Saharan Africa has consistently been one of the world’s fastest-growing regions over the last two decades. Underscoring their resilience, several African countries expanded their output even during the pandemic, and two – Ethiopia and Guinea – were among the world’s five fastest-growing economies last year.

Moreover, Africa’s advances transcend economics. As Georgieva has noted, “By improving policies and by strengthening institutions, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have made fundamental progress.” Over the past two decades, she said, extreme poverty in the region has declined by one-third, life expectancy has increased by a fifth, and real per capita income growth has averaged about 50%.

But these successes appear to have had little to no impact on the dominant credit-rating agencies. They downgraded South Africa – which accounts for more than 20% of total intra-African trade and is the continent’s leading driver of cross-border investment – and several other African countries to “junk” status at the height of the pandemic last year. The downgrades extended the already long list of African sovereigns deemed to be highly risky and subject to default-driven borrowing rates.

Some of these assessments seem erroneous in light of many African economies’ encouraging performance. Ethiopia’s GDP, for example, has increased more than tenfold since the turn of the century. And, in contrast to many other economies, the pandemic downturn did not entirely derail Ethiopia’s long-run growth trajectory. But it remains a sub-investment-grade borrower.

With African governments’ borrowing costs so high, annual interest expenses have become one of their fastest-growing budgetary expenditures, in many cases exceeding health budgets. In Zambia, interest payments rose almost 13-fold within a decade, from around $63 million in 2010 to more than $804 million in 2019. Across Africa, annual interest payments more than tripled over the same period, from $8.1 billion to around $24.9 billion.

Although interest expenses fell in 2020 (by 36.6% for Zambia and 26.6% for the region as a whole), they are expected to increase again after the crisis. This will reflect faster pandemic-triggered growth of external liabilities, as well as the expiration of temporary relief measures extended to vulnerable countries under the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative and the IMF’s Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust.

In a 2015 study, researchers at the University of Michigan estimated that African sovereigns were paying an interest premium on their external borrowing of around 2.9%, or an extra $2.2 billion between 2006 and 2014. That figure has probably increased since then, especially in view of widening spreads and the avalanche of rating downgrades.

This premium is a major impediment to African economies’ fiscal and debt sustainability and structural transformation. Africa’s total external debt is significantly lower in both absolute and per capita terms than that owed by advanced economies. But its ratio of external debt-service payments to budget revenues is significantly higher, reflecting the prohibitively high cost of default-driven rates.

The region’s exposure to recurrent terms-of-trade shocks, which tend to increase trade and fiscal deficits and worsen liquidity constraints, has also amplified its high perception premiums. Structurally transforming African economies to diversify sources of growth and trade away from commodities will reduce this ancillary risk over time.

This will require, as Macron and Georgieva have stressed, large and sustained sums of patient capital to drive investment beyond natural resources. But default-driven borrowing costs and high perception premiums are, in all likelihood, the most acute obstacles on the path toward such structural transformation.

The international community responded rapidly to the pandemic, and introduced several initiatives to help low-income countries address acute liquidity constraints and mounting balance-of-payments pressures. In the short term, these measures will likely reduce eligible countries’ external debt-service payments and bolster their capacity to contend with COVID-19. But they do not address Africa’s fundamental development challenges.

Until global investors and major rating agencies accurately integrate Africa’s brightening realities and diverse circumstances into their models, many countries will remain on the verge of debt distress, and structural transformation that is key to fiscal and debt sustainability will remain elusive. We must therefore hope that Macron’s May 18 summit will help to reduce Africa’s damaging perception premium, and compel international investors and policymakers to give the region an equal opportunity to access global finance.

The Charles Telfair Centre is non-profit, independent and non-partisan, and takes no specific position. All opinions are those of the authors/contributors only.

This article was originally published by © Project Syndicate 2021 and is not under a Creative Commons Licence.

Main Photo by Pixabay/Unsplash  

Maxwell Gomera, Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme in Rwanda, is a senior fellow of Aspen New Voices.

KIGALI – As many as 150 million people globally, roughly the combined population of Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, may have fallen into pandemic-induced extreme poverty over the past year. Partly as a result, governments are currently pumping unprecedented amounts of money into their COVID-19 response, spending over $14.6 trillion on rescue and stimulus measures in 2020 alone.

But a recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme and the University of Oxford indicates that only 18% of current recovery investments can be considered “green.” That’s a problem.

As governments prime the pumps of economic recovery, they must change the yardsticks by which they measure human progress and welfare. Otherwise, their investments risk further fueling the inequalities and environmental destruction that prepared the ground for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Environmental degradation and increasing contact between wildlife and humans enabled SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to jump from animals to people. And the conditions the virus encountered – shaped by vast social inequities – enabled it to erupt into a pandemic with devastating health, social, and economic consequences.

Even in countries that have stated their intention to address both environmental destruction and inequality, rescue packages are dominated by spending that supports unsustainable pre-pandemic economic activities. These misguided investments reinforce the conditions that got us here in the first place.

For example, countries such as India, Canada, South Africa, and China have set aside funding for green recoveries but are simultaneously propping up their fossil-fuel industries. While China has put forward an ambitious green recovery plan, construction of coal plants in its provinces surged in the first half of 2020.

South Africa has earmarked $3.5 billion of investment in three new energy projects that will ostensibly “reduce the use of diesel-based peaking electrical generators.” But the state-owned electric utility, Eskom, previously built the world’s third- and fourth-largest coal-fired power plants. The industrial region around Middelburg, with a population of 4.7 million, includes 12 coal-fired power plants and a huge refinery that produces liquid petroleum from coal. This facility generates more greenhouse-gas emissions annually than entire countries such as Norway and Portugal. Respiratory diseases in the region likely cause more than 300 premature deaths per year.

Other unsustainable activities – such as destroying forests, plowing and paving grasslands, and polluting fresh water – continue unabated. These natural resources sustain billions of people. They account for 47% of the rural poor’s household incomes in India, nearly 75% in Indonesia, and 89% in Brazil’s northern Amazon. Over 70% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa depend on forests and woodlands for their livelihoods.

To correct our course, we must change the way we measure human development and social progress. Without the right signposts, we will be unable to achieve the transformation our economies and societies must undergo to ensure our survival. National gross domestic product, the most widely used economic-development measure, is useful and provides a great deal of information closely related to human welfare. But it offers no guidance regarding how to avoid unsustainable and unequal outcomes.

Fortunately, as countries plan their post-pandemic recovery expenditures, they can consider a new tool: the Planetary-Pressures Adjusted Human Development Index (PHDI) developed by the United Nations Development Programme and its partners.

The PHDI is a gauge of human progress that accounts for poverty, inequality, and planetary strains. It measures not only a country’s health, education, and living standards, but also its carbon dioxide emissions and material footprint. The resulting index gives policymakers an indication of how development priorities would change if the well-being of both people and the planet were central to defining humanity’s progress.

Using this approach, more than 50 countries drop out of the very high human development group based on UNDP’s standard Human Development Index, while countries like Costa Rica, Moldova, and Panama rise at least 30 places. Planning that conserves nature would improve the well-being of billions of people.

Some might argue that GDP is a well-established universal yardstick, and that the PHDI is too complicated for countries facing urgent and competing development priorities. But the new index enables us to identify and measure the sustainability problem, and offers a clear alternative to relying on one main indicator – GDP – as a gauge of a country’s progress.

Without a different approach, we risk inviting the next pandemic by widening inequities and deepening the environmental crisis. The two go hand in hand. And when disaster ultimately strikes, the best we can hope for will be timely humanitarian relief.

Instead, governments should adopt new measures to address the environmental crisis and growing inequality, and make these part of a longer-term strategy that begins now. By measuring what matters, governments will be able to deliver recovery plans that strengthen green stewardship and reduce inequities, improving the prospects for a healthier and more prosperous future for all.

The Charles Telfair Centre is non-profit, independent and non-partisan, and takes no specific position. All opinions are those of the authors/contributors only.

This article was originally published by © Project Syndicate 2021 and is not under a Creative Commons Licence.

Main Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash  

Sharif Mahmud Khalid, Assistant Professor in Accounting and Financial Management, University of Sheffield

The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, is calling for governments around the world to support the US in setting up a global minimum corporation tax rate. She did not specify a rate but it comes at a time when the US government is trying to raise the nation’s internal corporation tax rate from 21% to 28%.

Yellen said that imposing a global minimum would “make sure the global economy thrives based on a more level playing field in the taxation of multinational corporations”, and that it would spur “innovation, growth and prosperity”.

The new US administration has already been trying to reach international agreement over a digital tax for online giants such as Amazon and Facebook, pushing for the OECD to reach a deal by the summer. The Economist reckons that Silicon Valley’s “big five” paid just US$220 billion (£159 billion) in cash taxes in the past decade, representing just 16% of their pre-tax profits.

Yet Yellen’s call for a global minimum corporation tax goes much further than this. And in my view it’s a bad idea: it would disadvantage developing countries and is probably not workable anyway.

A race to the bottom?

Yellen claims that a global minimum rate will end a “30-year race to the bottom” – but global practice points to a more mixed picture. In 2020, nine countries across five continents reduced their corporation tax rates by between one (Togo) and five percentage points (Greenland). Within the OECD, several countries have plans to cut their rates in the coming fiscal year or two: France is cutting from 32% to 25%, while Sweden is cutting from 21% to 20%. The Netherlands was also planning a cut, but has since changed its mind.

Many other countries have kept their rates stable for many years however. Nigeria’s rate has been steady at 30%, while Brazil’s is an unchanging 34%. China’s rate has been 25% for more than a decade (but 15% for sectors that the government is trying to encourage, such as certain tech businesses). South Africa’s rate has been 28% for nearly a decade too, though it is coming down to 27% in 2022.

Each rate is subject to drivers peculiar to the country in question and its economy, but none of these countries is “racing to the bottom”. Neither are they begging for a global minimum rate. There has been far more interest in a digital corporation tax, with some companies such as India, the Czech Republic, France and Turkey already introducing a levy.

Threat to flexibility

In developing and developed countries alike, multinationals are a source of foreign direct investment, which makes them attractive to governments. These corporations both hire workers and create many more jobs indirectly through everything from using local contractors to creating demand for consumer goods through the salaries they pay.

Some countries have used their freedom to set corporation tax rates as a way to attract such business. There are examples of low corporation tax regimes around the world, from Ireland (12.5%) to Moldova (12%), from Paraguay (10%) to Uzbekistan (7.5%). In a world where there are huge disparities in the income levels of different countries, a minimum global corporation tax rate could crowd out those who are not especially attractive but for the fact that they can offer lower rates.

For some corporations, it will also raise the cost of doing international business. Take the example of an American corporation with a presence in Ireland. Suppose the global minimum rate was set at 20%: such a company will have to pay 7.5 percentage points more of corporation tax on trading in Ireland than it does at present. Not only does this potentially make Ireland less attractive, it means that the costs will be passed on – be it to the company’s suppliers or its customers or whatever.

More generally, a global minimum rate would remove the flexibility for different nations to pursue policies that best suit them. Take COVID-19, for example. With
IMF and World Bank data suggesting that developing countries may experience a longer economic hangover than their developed counterparts, Ghana recently introduced a 30% tax rebate for companies in sectors such as travel, tourism and hospitality for the rest of 2021.

This is comparable to the UK’s recent announcement that it was deferring a planned increase in corporation tax for several years to encourage business spending. Under a global minimum corporation tax rate regime, will independent nation states be able to proffer such initiatives?

Finally, a global minimum rate will not end creative accounting. Each country’s tax code will still have its own set of complicated exceptions and exemptions, and companies will still pay specialist advisers handsomely to help them make the most of them. A global minimum rate will also do nothing to help with tax evasion, which was recently estimated to cost taxpayers almost half a trillion US dollars a year.

In short, Yellen’s proposal is no magic bullet and it’s targeting a problem that is not what it appears. This is a battle that is not worth winning, and it will cause much collateral damage before it comes to an end.

The Charles Telfair Centre is non-profit, independent and non-partisan, and takes no specific position. All opinions are those of the authors/contributors only. 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 

Main photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash  

Edoardo Campanella, economist at UniCredit Bank & fellow at the Center for the Governance of Change at IE University in Madrid.

MILAN – The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged the stock of physical and human capital. Firms have postponed or canceled investment projects, and laid-off or furloughed workers’ skills have deteriorated. The crisis, however, has boosted the oft-overlooked variable of social capital, elevating its role as a key source of economic growth.

Popularized in the 1990s by Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam, social capital refers to “the features of social organizations, such as networks, norms, and trust that facilitate action and cooperation for mutual benefit.” A somewhat nebulous concept, it comprises the shared values, behavioral conventions, and sources of mutual trust and common identity that allow a society to function. The more social capital a group has, the greater its willingness and ability to act collectively in pursuit of valuable objectives.

In other words, social capital is the glue that holds communities and nations together. Under the right conditions, repeated and mutually beneficial social interactions lead to faster economic growth, better health outcomes, and greater stability.

In the case of the pandemic, social capital provided the first line of defense against the virus when vaccines and effective medical treatments had not yet become available. Here, individuals taking steps to prevent contagion provided a public good. Each conscious act aimed at reducing exposure to the virus lowered the probability of infection for the rest of the community. In the jargon of economists, those who reduced their mobility and social interactions internalized a negative externality that they otherwise would have imposed on society.

A sense of attachment to a larger group induces people to tolerate the high individual costs of cautious behaviors. A large and growing body of academic research has shown that spontaneous social distancing is more likely in places with better-developed civic cultures. For example, a European cross-country comparison found that “a one standard deviation increase in social capital [led] to between 14% and 40% fewer COVID-19 cases per capita accumulated from mid-March until end of June [2020], as well as between 7% and 16% fewer excess deaths.”

Moreover, places with high social capital tend to be more economically vibrant and civic-minded than places where people are isolated. Not surprisingly, in the early stages of the pandemic, the virus spread more rapidly in densely populated cities like Paris, New York, London, and Milan, because nobody realized what was coming. But as soon as the need for behavioral changes became apparent, inhabitants in more civic-minded areas adopted social distancing measures even before formal restrictions were imposed, and they were more responsive to subsequent state directives.

Social capital also played a key role in powering economies through months of lockdowns and remote working. While digital technologies helped people to stay connected, it was social capital that kept those connections alive. Employees working from home remained productive because they had built up a sense of reciprocal trust, shared identity, and common purpose with their colleagues. And on that basis, many were able to develop entirely new (digital) working relationships.

In most cases, companies ended up expanding their internal social capital during the pandemic. Having partly lost their ability to control their workers directly, they ended up empowering them. With more flexibility to manage their time and lives outside of work, many employees could take on even more responsibility and deliver higher-quality output. According to a cross-country survey by the Boston Consulting Group, 75% of employees maintained or increased their productivity despite the pandemic restrictions.

In today’s hybrid workplace, social capital is clearly one of the most important factors behind such results. Unlike its physical counterpart (factories, equipment, and so on), social capital does not deteriorate with use – just the opposite. But like any other form of capital, it needs to be maintained and upgraded, and this will be especially true in the post-pandemic phase.

In normal circumstances, our connections and relationships evolve and expand over time. Yet without appropriate measures to reactivate and reopen social networks, months of lockdowns and restrictions could exhaust some relationships or result in group segregation. Owing to what Putnam calls “bonding social capital,” people might become so attached to a specific group that they succumb to clannishness or tribalism. Indeed, populism and nationalism are social capital’s degenerate forms, and they have been resurgent in some places during the pandemic.

Governments and corporations thus should try to build more “bridging social capital,” by leveraging the sense of responsibility, solidarity, and altruism developed during the COVID-19 crisis. This form of social capital links people across different groups, and will be necessary to prevent the next pandemic and to combat climate change. But civic mindedness alone will not be enough. Individuals will need to be convinced to internalize the negative externalities of their actions.

With that goal in mind, governments should extend more autonomy to citizens, positioning themselves less as controllers and regulators and more as catalysts and facilitators. And corporations, for their part, should look for ways to foster a culture of reciprocal trust, invest more in the digital transition, and explore new ways to organize work.

Viewed in these terms, COVID-19 could leave a positive legacy: a firmer base of social capital to underpin the responsibility and altruism that the world will need as it faces the challenges ahead.

The Charles Telfair Centre is non-profit, independent and non-partisan, and takes no specific position. All opinions are those of the authors/contributors only.

This article was originally published by © Project Syndicate 2021 and is not under a Creative Commons Licence.

Main Photo by Zdeněk Macháček/Unsplash

David Richard Walwyn, Professor of Technology Management, University of Pretoria

Padmashree Gehl Sampath, Fellow, and Senior Advisor, Global Access in Action Program, Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University

The uneven availability of COVID-19 vaccines has become an increasingly urgent and vexatious issue. But managing the problem of what’s been labelled “vaccine nationalism” is proving a hard nut to crack.

Shortages of medicines and vulnerable supply chains for critical medicines are issues for nearly all developing countries. In Africa, in particular, there’s limited manufacturing capacity. Over 20 countries don’t have any capacity at all. And many regions continue to import at least 95% of their pharmaceutical requirements.

Understanding why this is the case is key. After all, there is ample evidence that governments can be effective economic actors. This includes being able to exercise large influence on the manufacturing sector. They can, for example, build capacity through incentives, regulation and policy. Experiences from other countries show that public investment and public procurement in the domestic pharmaceutical sector can create capacity and markets.

So why hasn’t this happened on the continent?

Typically, these products are technology and capital intensive. They require highly skilled personnel and reliable supply chains for key raw materials and specialised equipment. And the initial investment in people and infrastructure necessitates long term stable markets with sufficient volume to justify the risk.

The absence of this security, even in the continent’s larger markets, such as South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt, limits expansion of this critical sector.

We conducted a study to understand the extent to which gaps in the availability of financing were constraining the development of manufacturing capacity for vaccines and other health equipment. Our findings show how governments, firms and donor agencies should align their efforts to support diagnostics, vaccines and therapies as a critical resource.

We identify a number of approaches that should be explored. These include joint plans for regional production hubs, pooled procurement, direct grants, periods of market exclusivity, international technology transfer and redirecting of international development aid.

Investigation

As part of the study, we looked at two case studies in South Africa: Ketlaphela Pharmaceuticals and the Biovac Institute.

Ketlaphela is a state owned company. It was created to manufacture active pharmaceutical ingredients and medical products mainly for communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. It has yet to produce any pharmaceuticals.

Biovac is public-private partnership between the South African government and a consortium of healthcare companies. Its capacity is small compared to the COVID-19 vaccine market. Nevertheless it holds three important lessons on how a country like South Africa can go about building this kind of capacity.

Firstly, it provided long term market security. This was done through an effective 15-year contract with the National Department of Health. Second, it allowed Biovac to receive a price premium as a means of funding the company’s re-investment in vaccine manufacturing. And, lastly, it supported the establishment of a strong research and development capability.

To understand how these experiences checked out with the broader realities of pharmaceutical production across Africa, we mapped funding flows for pharmaceutical projects on the continent. We also interviewed stakeholders, including civil society advocacy groups and industry experts. And we talked to diagnostics, vaccines and therapies manufacturers across the continent to understand the on-the-ground realities.

Barriers

Conditions for the financing of diagnostics, vaccines and therapies manufacturing across Africa are clearly very diverse. Some countries have liquid financial markets, readily available foreign exchange and sophisticated financial systems. Others face real constraints in terms of access to capital and foreign exchange.

Similarly, we found that smaller producers faced different challenges to larger established producers.

Nevertheless, we did find some commonalities.

Companies reported clear discrepancies between political aspirations to reduce import dependency in healthcare, and day-to-day realities. In particular, businesses complained about factors that increased their cost of capital and made them less competitive. These were related to systemic or infrastructure failures that they had little control over. They included:

• high electricity costs and unreliable supply,
• lack of clean water,
• port delays,
• weak infrastructure, and
• the limited availability of skilled personnel.

Our interviews confirmed that these additional costs made it harder for local companies to break even and recover working capital in highly competitive markets.

As a result, firms often retreated into narrower product categories. Or they closed, unable to compete without greater government support against Indian and Chinese companies.

Some answers

The study highlighted two critical areas as being fundamental in reforming the public support structures in favour of local companies.

In the first place, governments must use public procurement. They can do so by providing longer term supply contracts with strong offtake guarantees (take-or-pay).

Secondly, donor agencies need to review their procurement strategies and reconsider them in favour of local manufactures. These are presently based on accredited low-cost facilities, mainly in India and China.

This is more easily said than done. Nevertheless, the essential take home from the interviews was that when local firms could produce good quality products, they needed to be able to access markets without being ‘crowded out’ by larger companies that had economies of scale and scope. This could help create a wider range of suppliers from developing countries in the long run.

The role of international financing agencies is critical in building local resilience to global health emergencies. For instance, the Global Fund is responsible for financing and procuring 21% of the drugs for the treatment of HIV. Similar figures are reported for TB and malaria.

Similarly, one of the objectives of Gavi’s Strategy for 2021-2026 (GAVI 5.0) is to shape healthy markets for vaccine products. This could be reviewed against these realities, especially given the supply constraints faced by the COVAX facility.

These agencies have the market power to diversify sources of supply without undermining the cost of public health services. The entities could work with national governments to build local capacity and increase resilience.

Unlocking financial support

Interestingly, the mapping of funding flows showed that there is investment capital available in global financial markets. This includes capital for African diagnostics, vaccines and therapies investment.

To the extent there are constraints on financing for manufacturing, this is not because of a global shortage of available capital. Institutions such as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation and the African Development Bank have announced large commitments to support responses to COVID-19. Unfortunately, this funding has not yet been allocated to projects for African pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Likewise, foundations are financing research and development, advance purchase commitments of vaccines and diagnostics, and other efforts to address COVID-19. But they too have not materially funded projects to produce in Africa.

Given the devastating impact of the pandemic on the continent’s economies, international institutions and governments must work together to bring pharmaceutical manufacturing to African countries.

The Charles Telfair Centre is non-profit, independent and non-partisan, and takes no specific position. All opinions are those of the authors/contributors only.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Main photo Nataliya Vaitkevich/Pexel  

Philippe Copinschi, Enseignant en relations internationales à Sciences Po Paris, Sciences Po

C’est une révolution silencieuse qui est en marche. Sur un marché automobile en plein marasme dans le sillon de la crise sanitaire – les ventes de voitures neuves ont plongé de 24 % en Europe en 2020 par rapport à 2019 – les ventes de véhicules électriques (VE, comprenant les véhicules 100 % électriques et les hybrides rechargeables) ont explosé en 2020. En particulier en Europe, dorénavant premier marché des VE au monde devant la Chine. C’est l’analyse que nous avons menée avec d’autres chercheurs dans un rapport publié par l’Observatoire de la sécurité des flux et des matières énergétiques.

Alors qu’ils ne représentaient que 3 % des ventes d’automobiles en Europe en 2019, ils ont dépassé les 10 % de parts de marché en 2020, avec une nette accélération en fin d’année. En décembre dernier, leur part a ainsi atteint 20 à 25 % sur les principaux marchés européens (Allemagne, France, Royaume-Uni, et nettement plus sur les marchés pionniers du nord de l’Europe comme la Suède (50 %), les Pays-Bas (75 %) et surtout la Norvège, où ils contribuent désormais pour plus de 85 % des ventes – contre moins de 20 % il y a seulement 5 ans, et où les ventes de voitures à essence et diesel sont devenues insignifiantes, respectivement 5 et 2,5 % du marché en décembre 2020.

Cette évolution spectaculaire, qui intervient alors même que le prix du pétrole est resté structurellement bas durant toute l’année 2020, s’explique par la combinaison de plusieurs facteurs.

Coût en baisse, autonomie en hausse

En moyenne, la batterie représente à elle seule plus de la moitié du prix d’une voiture électrique, mais les progrès technologiques continus ont déjà permis une réduction substantielle de leur coût de fabrication.

Avec ce coût en baisse et une autonomie en hausse, les VE comblent progressivement leur manque de compétitivité par rapport aux voitures à moteur thermique, d’autant que la plupart des pays européens accordent de généreuses aides financières à l’achat et que de nombreuses municipalités réservent d’appréciables avantages aux conducteurs de VE : bornes de recharge mises à disposition, accès privilégiés aux voies de bus ou aux parkings, etc.

L’autre facteur clé expliquant l’envolée des ventes de véhicules électriques tient à l’évolution de la législation européenne en matière d’émission de CO₂ des voitures. L’abaissement continu – et annoncé longtemps à l’avance – des seuils d’émission autorisés pour les automobiles neuves pousse depuis plusieurs années les constructeurs à proposer une gamme toujours plus large de véhicules électriques : en 2020, près de 65 nouveaux modèles ont été mis sur le marché européen et ils devraient être autour de 100 cette année.

Au contraire des aides financières gouvernementales ponctuelles qui ont un impact temporaire, la stratégie de l’Union européenne a permis le développement d’un écosystème complet de véhicules électriques en offrant aux constructeurs la prévisibilité à long terme indispensable pour engager les lourds investissements nécessaires.

Cette conjonction de facteurs – financiers, réglementaires, industriels – permet au véhicule électrique de s’imposer désormais comme une nouvelle norme de la mobilité individuelle.

Le pétrole détrôné

Au rythme actuel, l’essentiel des nouvelles immatriculations en Europe sera électrique d’ici quelques années à peine. Il s’agit d’un changement radical de paradigme de la mobilité.

Un siècle après s’être imposé comme l’énergie incontournable dans le transport, le pétrole va ainsi perdre une grande partie de son statut de ressource stratégique dont chaque gouvernement doit impérativement assurer le bon approvisionnement pour la sécurité et l’économie du pays.

Le transport de marchandises, routier et maritime, dépend encore quasi exclusivement du pétrole – à 99 % pour le transport maritime (AIE), et en 2020 en Europe, les ventes de camion étaient à 96 % au diesel, même si les alternatives (gaz naturel, biocarburants, hydrogène, électricité…) gagnent en compétitivité.

Quant au transport aérien, il devrait rester encore totalement tributaire du pétrole pour de nombreuses années.

Pour autant, la capacité des sociétés de se mouvoir et des armées de mener des opérations militaires est progressivement en train de cesser de reposer exclusivement sur la disponibilité du pétrole. De plus, l’électrification de la mobilité routière, qui représente près de la moitié de la consommation globale de l’or noir, pourrait rapidement placer l’industrie pétrolière en surcapacité de production.

Nombre de prospectivistes ont longtemps considéré que c’était l’épuisement inéluctable des ressources pétrolières qui allait rendre nécessaire la transition énergétique dans le domaine du transport.

C’est en réalité le réchauffement climatique et dans une moindre mesure, la pollution de l’air, qui apparaissent comme les principales motivations derrière cette électrification de la mobilité. Comme aimait à le rappeler l’ancien ministre du pétrole saoudien, Cheikh Ahmed Yamani, « l’âge de la pierre n’a pas pris fin par manque de pierre », mais parce que l’homme a réalisé des progrès scientifiques lui permettant de développer des technologies plus performantes.

Une ressource réservée aux plus pauvres

Dans le monde inégalitaire dans lequel nous vivons, cela ne signifie pas pour autant que le pétrole cessera rapidement d’être consommé à grande échelle – en particulier dans les pays en développement où l’accès aux technologies de pointe est souvent limité.

C’est en particulier le cas de l’Afrique subsaharienne, devenue depuis longtemps le réceptacle des vieilles voitures européennes et asiatiques ne répondant plus aux normes environnementales ou de sécurité de leurs pays d’origine.

Mais l’or noir est très certainement en train de changer de statut : d’énergie stratégique pour laquelle les grandes puissances étaient prêtes à se battre, il s’apprête à devenir l’énergie du pauvre, celle qu’utiliseront les populations des États n’ayant pas les moyens d’acquérir les technologies les plus avancées.

Main photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash  

The Charles Telfair Centre is non-profit, independent and non-partisan, and takes no specific position. All opinions are those of the authors/contributors only.

Cet article est republié à partir de The Conversation sous licence Creative Commons. Lire l’article original.