**Bruegel's director Guntram Wolff looks at north Africa's economic growth in the light of the region's trade agreements with the EU, welcoming Karim El Aynaoui and Uri Dadush to the Backstage series on 'The Sound of Economics'.**

In this episode of Backstage, Bruegel's director Guntram Wolff welcomes Uri Dadush, a non-resident scholar at Bruegel and a Senior Fellow at the OCP Policy Center, as well as Karim El Aynaoui, managing director at the OCP Policy Center. Together, they look at north Africa's economic growth in the light of the region's trade agreements with the EU.

This podcast episode touches upon a [Policy Contribution](http://bruegel.org/2018/11/assessing-the-european-unions-north-africa-trade-agreements/) co-authored by Uri Dadush, which provides an economic assessment of the EU-north Africa trade agreements. While their performance is not spectacular, the agreements' common view often appears too harsh, especially bearing in mind the unfavourable domestic and international environment in which they came into force.

Despite the visible misallocation of capital and insufficient job creation, some sectors in the region – such as the automotive, pharmaceutical and aeronautical industries in Morocco – are doing exceptionally well, both in terms of performance and integration. The question remains about the potential direction the region may wish to take when moving forward with its growth plan. To ensure strengthened EU-north Africa value chains, we have to move beyond the blanket-approach and instead reward the best performance.

For further reading, you might consider an [opinion piece on the China-Africa economic relationship](http://bruegel.org/2018/09/china-made-two-promises-in-africa-can-it-keep-them/) written by Alicia García-Herrero, as well as a [blog post](http://bruegel.org/2018/04/free-trade-in-africa-an-important-goal-but-not-easy-to-achieve/) by Marek Dabrowski and Yana Myachenkova on the difficult task of achieving free trade in Africa.

This podcast episode was recorded during [the third edition of the "Platform for Advanced & Emerging Economies Policy Dialogue"](http://bruegel.org/events/policy-responses-for-an-eu-mena-shared-future/), which focused on the core theme of “Policy Responses for an EU-MENA shared future”.