The post Covid-19 crisis: Effects on the development of Africa and its relations with the European Union. An economic geography approach of globalisation

The New Economic Geography has focused on the study of globalisation and its territorial impacts, including those related to development.1 In this analytical process, a new element has broken out whose capacity to affect the globalising process and the location of activities is undeniable: the global pandemic COVID-19. Indeed, the rapid spread of the virus itself has been closely linked to the intense globalisation of passenger flows, favoured by the reduction of airfares in recent decades. This paper presents the current state of this debate, analyses the impacts of the pandemic on the economic geography of globalisation, and sets out some economic policies to address these impacts both for health and economic crisis. In particular, the effects of Covid-19 on the processes of loss of relevance of global value chains, the relocation of production from emerging countries in other countries near consumer centres, the reduction of people’s mobility and the effects of commodity price declines on the different economies of the African continent are discussed here. In short, it is a question of examining the deglobalising effect on the economy, the processes of regionalisation and renationalisation of production or reshoring and its effects on Africa. These changes could lead to a new geography of economic development, which will pose new challenges to Africa, but also to the EU and the relations between both continents. The analysis is based on the DHL Global Connectedness Index (GCI), developed by Altman and Bastian2 from trade, capital, information and people flows, and other globalisation indexes. Key words: Africa, African Union, economic development, economic geography, European Union, globalisation, regional integration