Economy

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.

This guide is a compilation of some of the forms of descriptive analysis that WFP and partners have undertaken since 1994.

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).

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.

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?