Economy

Trading Grains in South Sudan: Stories of opportunities, shocks and changing tastes

Year of Publication
2020
Document Publisher/Creator
Jovensia Uchalla
Institution/organisation
The Rift Valley Institute
Topic
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://riftvalley.net/publication/trading-grains-south-sudan-stories-opportunities-shocks-and-changing-tastes
Summary
Displaced Tastes is a research project run by the Rift Valley Institute in partnership with the Catholic University of South Sudan under the X-Border Local Research Network. The project examines the changing tastes for food in South Sudan in the context of the country’s economic transition and place in the regional, cross-border economy of grain.

In the urban centres of South Sudan, people increasingly depend on markets to buy grains imported from South Sudan’s neighbours—particularly Sudan and Uganda—for their daily food. While this growing reliance on a cash-based regional economy of food is becoming more evident, much less is known about the lives of the people involved in the grain trade—the traders, transporters and millers—who provide South Sudan’s urban areas with staple foods like maize, sorghum and cassava.

To understand how grain is traded in South Sudan, and who by, Jovensia Uchalla examines the life stories of South Sudanese and foreign grain traders, transporters and millers in Juba. These stories talk of opportunities, shocks and changing tastes. Over the past half-decade, risks have risen and smaller traders have taken over from bigger ones. Most of the people discussed in this article moved into the grain trade after they suffered a shock in their previous jobs or shifted positions within the grain trade from drivers and loaders to millers and wholesalers.

Date of Publication
27/10/2020

An Introduction to the Food Economies of Southern Sudan 1994 - 2000 V1

Year of Publication
2000
Document Publisher/Creator
William Fielding
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://www.csrf-southsudan.org/repository/introduction-food-economy-research-southern-sudan-1994-2000-v-1/
Summary
This guide is a compilation of some of the forms of descriptive analysis that WFP and partners have undertaken since 1994.
Date of Publication
10/12/2020

Doing Business 2017: Equal Opportunity for All - South Sudan

Year of Publication
2016
Document Publisher/Creator
The World Bank
Topic
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://www.csrf-southsudan.org/repository/business-2017-equal-opportunity-south-sudan/
Summary
This economy profile presents the World Bank Doing Business indicators for South Sudan. To allow useful comparison, it also provides data for other selected economies (comparator economies) for each indicator. Doing Business 2017 is the 14th in a series of annual reports investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Economies are ranked on their ease of doing business; for 2016 South Sudan ranks 187. Doing Business sheds light on how easy or difficult it is for a local entrepreneur to open and run a small to medium-size business when complying with relevant regulations. It measures and tracks changes in regulations affecting 11 areas in the life cycle of a business: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency and labor market regulation. Doing Business 2017 presents the data for the labor market regulation indicators in an annex. The report does not present rankings of economies on labor market regulation indicators or include the topic in the aggregate distance to frontier score or ranking on the ease of doing business. The indicators are used to analyze economic outcomes and identify what reforms have worked, where and why. The data in this report are current as of June 1, 2016 (except for the paying taxes indicators, which cover the period January–December 2015).
Date of Publication
13/01/2021

Republic of South Sudan: Debt Sustainability Analysis

Year of Publication
2017
Document Publisher/Creator
Roger Nord, Paloma Anos Casero and Et al
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://www.csrf-southsudan.org/repository/republic-south-sudan-debt-sustainability-analysis/
Summary
Despite moderate levels of external debt, the combined impact of a civil conflict, a large fall in oil prices, and high levels of fiscal spending has left South Sudan in debt distress. This crisis has caused payment delays on international obligations, on civil servant salaries, and other government obligations. Moreover, international lines of credit have been restructured on longer maturities, international reserves have declined to near exhaustion, and the country is currently constrained from accessing long term external financing. However, assuming implementation of the recently adopted economic adjustment policies and a successful peace process, the debt outlook would improve considerably which could allow for a gradual resumption of external financing. However, vulnerabilities remain high and a
prolonged period of lower oil prices or failure to address the country’s economic and security problems could cause continued debt sustainability problem.
Attachment
Date of Publication
18/01/2021

Will the Impact of the Pandemic on the Expected National Output Persist?

Year of Publication
2021
Document Publisher/Creator
James Alic Garang
Institution/organisation
The Sudd Institute
Topic
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://www.suddinstitute.org/publications/show/60b9c59aa6872
Summary
This weekly review contributes to the debate on how the COVID-19 induced hysteresis effects could affect growth in South Sudan. It addresses two related questions: What channels would transmit the COVID-19 scarring effects to the output? What can public policy do to support recovery?
Date of Publication
29/06/2021

Breaking of the Borderlands: Understanding Migration Pathways in Bahr El -Ghazal, South Sudan

Year of Publication
2020
Document Publisher/Creator
Nicki Kindersley and Joseph Diing Majok
Institution/organisation
The Rift Valley Institute
Topic
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://riftvalley.net/publication/breaking-out-borderlands-understanding-migrant-pathways-bahr-el-ghazal-south-sudan
Summary
South Sudan, along with many of its neighbouring countries in north-east Africa, faces a seemingly intractable economic crisis. Cycles of civil war and brokered elite peace deals since 2013 have entrenched widespread economic breakdown with locally specific dynamics. This has resulted in increased security surveillance, repression and control. It has also encouraged sustained armed recruitment and out-migration across national borders for survival.

This research project aims to understand the dynamics of this protracted economic and political crisis from the perspective of poor residents in the conflict-affected borderland of South Sudan and southern Darfur in Sudan. The study asks two core questions: First, how do residents in the borderlands of South Sudan seek survival, welfare and better lives in the economies and cross-border migrant pathways available to them? Second, how do young men and women navigate the risks of migrant and military work across South Sudan, Sudan and further afield?
The pathways of young people into migrant and military work in South Sudan, across the border with Sudan and towards Egypt, Libya and onwards are catalyzed and connected by the repressive structures of the economic system in the South Sudan borderlands. This report begins with a description of the exploitative economy that traps and impoverishes residents on this borderland. It is this economy that frames the decisions and pathways of the young men and women who seek work and lives elsewhere.

The report then follows these young people to militarized livelihoods in Juba, across the border to Darfur and Khartoum, through the peri-urban settlements and gold mining fields in Sudan, and onwards to Egypt, Libya, Chad and beyond. The report concludes with an exploration of the borderland migrant networks that keep people alive and connected through these pathways and choices.
Date of Publication
04/11/2020

The Macroeconomic Environment for Jobs in South Sudan: Jobs, Recovery, and Peacebuilding in Urban South Sudan – Technical Report II

Year of Publication
2020
Document Publisher/Creator
Joseph Mawejje
Topic
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/34664/The-Macroeconomic-Environment-for-Jobs-in-South-Sudan-Jobs-Recovery-and-Peacebuilding-in-Urban-South-Sudan-Second-Technical-Report.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Summary
This study assesses the macro-fiscal framework for jobs in South Sudan, working with the limited macro-fiscal data available on the fiscal years 2019 and 2020. The macroeconomic environment can hardly be more difficult for South Sudanese looking to make a living. For workers, the dramatic contraction of non-oil output since the beginning of the conflict reflected a loss of job activities and a breakdown in market demand. A 60-fold increase in prices since before the conflict poses a serious obstacle to job activities, while an overvalued exchange rate weakens incentives. The oil sector is a big part of the economy, and the budget is dependent on oil revenue – but with weak governance, too little spending goes toward investment in development. The public sector in employment is large and a source of patronage, but it has an important function as a source of demand for goods and services. The study is one of a set of four reports assessing different aspects of jobs in urban South Sudan in order to formulate policy for recovery.
Date of Publication
11/12/2020

Buffering State-making: Geopolitics in the Sudd Marshlands of South Sudan

Year of Publication
2020
Document Publisher/Creator
Peer Schouten and Jan Bachmann
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1858283
Summary
This paper explores the history and ongoing transformation of the South Sudanese Sudd marshlands as a buffer zone in a variety of subsequent projects of domination and their sub-version. Its argument will be that the contemporary geopolitics of the Sudd cannot be understood properly without unwinding the historical layers of contestation and conflict around these projects of control and their reversal, projects which have sought to shape and have been shaped crucially by the area’s specific ecology. For more than a century, different external ventures – colonial, nationalist, secessionist – encountered in the southern Sudanese marshlands a formidable buffer to the realization of their various projects of control. Ambitions of making the Nile water flow, establishing effective state author-ity, or building lines of communication, get stuck in the Sudd’s difficult terrain. Building on the political ecology and wider social theory on terrain, resistance and warfare, The authors conceptualize the Sudd as a lively political ecology – one characterized by constant struggles and accommodations between the centripetal logics of state-making and the centrifugal propensities of vernacular political culture.
Date of Publication
13/01/2021

The Economic Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic in South Sudan: An Update

Year of Publication
2021
Document Publisher/Creator
Augustino T. Mayai
Institution/organisation
The Sudd Institute
Topic
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://www.suddinstitute.org/publications/show/600ff941903ac
Summary
his policy brief studies the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Sudan. The findings are educative. First, the health effects of the pandemic in the country have been surprisingly less pronounced than expected, marked by very low morbidity and fatality rates. Second, despite this positive health news, the pandemic has had negative effects on the economy, starting with dramatic declines in domestic production and revenue collection, followed by a very volatile rising cost of living. These economic consequences are far-reaching, severely weakening, for example, human capital formation, especially in education, as the lockdown has deprived some 2 million school-age children of learning opportunities. Finally, economic recovery from COVID-19 will require a coordinated strategy that fosters broadened synergies in response to sector-specific COVID-19 ramifications. Interventions that prioritize smaller firms and women enterprises should be in order.
Date of Publication
01/02/2021

Economic Policy during the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Sudan

Year of Publication
2020
Document Publisher/Creator
Augustino T. Mayai
Institution/organisation
The Sudd Institute
Topic
NGO associated?
Source URL
https://suddinstitute.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=516f3e7b2f862a5eb959fae7b&id=2dae56b841&e=3a19d14ead
Summary
South Sudan is experiencing a distressing economic period. Government revenue has shrunk to historic lows and debt, both domestic and external, is mounting, marked by unsettled salary arrears and outstanding loans. A combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout of just-concluded civil strife is largely to blame. The pandemic and conflict have dramatically impeded oil sales, collection of non-oil revenues, and access to remittances and foreign aid. While income levels have dropped drastically, the cost of basic commodities continues to spiral upward. The government initially introduced economically taxing COVID-19 restrictions before relaxing them four months later; other pandemic-related actions included cushioning the foreign exchange market, shaking-up the economic sector’s leadership, and attempting to abolish the South Sudanese pound. This review analyzes the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and specifically focuses on production, the performance of the commodity and foreign exchange markets, and resultant government policy interventions. It concludes by recommending:

Sustained improvements in peace and security;
Investing in human and physical capital;
Investing in agriculture;
Improving non-oil revenue collection;
Instituting and bolstering economic reform frameworks to combat corruption
Date of Publication
27/10/2020