Diplomacy & Trade
Bilateral agreements, multilateral positions and trade decisions read for their tourism economy consequences, often invisible to the diplomats taking them. The Sovereign Signalling framework holds that tourism flows respond to the foreign policy positions a country takes long before they respond to the marketing campaigns its tourism board funds.
Algeria and Morocco share a 1,559-kilometre border. It has been closed for thirty-two years.
The longest closed land border in Africa does not separate two countries at war. It separates two countries at peace, shut in a single week in August 1994 after a hotel attack and a visa dispute, and it has outlasted the king and the four presidents in office when it closed. Economists put the cost of the divided Maghreb at more than 2 percent of annual growth for every country in the region, every year, for three decades. The Sovereign Signalling framework reads it as entry policy held as a diplomatic weapon so long that the tourism circuit it killed no longer has a name.
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