The Covid-19 pandemic dragged the world into an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions since the 1929 crisis. The Economic Commission for Africa has revised downwards its growth estimates for the year 2020, which is expected to be around 1.8% in best case scenario. Due to its magnitude and the speed with which it brought entire sectors of the economy to a standstill, some of which represent important sources of employment for North Africa (such as tourism), the crisis soon became multidimensional, putting high pressure on public finance. For North African countries, the crisis comes at a time when the countries’ development models were showing signs of running out of steam, as evidenced by the net slowdown in per capita GDP growth from 2010. At the dawn of the pandemic, North Africa was facing volatile growth, chronic fiscal and external deficits, and a high unemployment rate expected to exceed 15% in 2020.
