North Africa
Where the continent's largest tourism numbers live, where the Mediterranean and Atlantic gateway strategies compete, and where Casablanca is rewriting the connectivity map for the entire continent. North Africa's tourism economy is older, larger and more institutionally developed than the rest of the continent — and faces the most direct competition from European destinations for the same source markets.
Algeria and Morocco share a 1,559-kilometre border. It has been closed for thirty-two years.
The longest closed land border in Africa separates two countries at peace. Shut in a single week in August 1994, 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, per country, per year — and the Marrakech-to-Algiers circuit the geography begs for cannot be built while the road between the region's two anchor states has a fence across it.
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