IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wsi/gejxxx/v12y2012i04n1524-5861.1873.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Contribution of Chinese FDI to Africa's Pre Crisis Growth Surge

Author

Listed:
  • John Whalley

    (University of Western Ontario)

  • Aaron Weisbrod

    (The London School of Economics and Political Science)

Abstract

In the 3 years before the 2008 Financial Crisis, GDP growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (averaged over individual economies) was around 6%, or 2 percentage points above mean growth rates for the preceding 10 years. This period also coincided with significant Chinese FDI flows into these countries, accounting for up to 10% of total inward FDI flows for certain countries in these years. We use growth accounting methods to assess what portion of this elevated growth can be attributed to Chinese inward FDI. We follow Solow (1957), Dennison (1962), and others and use data for individual economies between 1990 and 2008 to calculate Solow residuals for these years for individual economies. We use capital stock data, workforce, and factor share data by country. Capital stock data is unavailable directly and so we use perpetual inventory methods to construct the data. Factor shares come from UN National Accounts data. We then run counterfactual growth accounting experiments for thirteen Sub-Saharan African countries excluding Chinese FDI inflows for 2005-2007 and also 2003-2009. Our individual results vary by year and country, but there are several year/country combinations where Chinese FDI contributed to an additional one half of a percentage point or above to GDP growth. These results suggest that a significant, even if in some cases small, portion of the elevated growth in Sub-Saharan Africa in the three years before the Financial Crisis and also in the two years afterwards (2008-2009) can be attributed to Chinese inward investment.

Suggested Citation

  • John Whalley & Aaron Weisbrod, 2012. "The Contribution of Chinese FDI to Africa's Pre Crisis Growth Surge," Global Economy Journal (GEJ), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 12(4), pages 1-28, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:wsi:gejxxx:v:12:y:2012:i:04:n:1524-5861.1873
    DOI: 10.1515/1524-5861.1873
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1515/1524-5861.1873
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1515/1524-5861.1873?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Khanindra Ch. Das & Nilanjan Banik, 2015. "Outbound Foreign Direct Investment from China and India," China Report, , vol. 51(3), pages 204-229, August.
    2. Bijun Wang & Rui Mao & Qin Gou, 2014. "Overseas Impacts of China's Outward Direct Investment," Asian Economic Policy Review, Japan Center for Economic Research, vol. 9(2), pages 227-249, July.
    3. Whalley John & Weisbrod Aaron, 2012. "The Contribution of Chinese FDI to Africa's Pre Crisis Growth Surge," Global Economy Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 12(4), pages 1-28, December.
    4. Anindya Biswas & Biswajit Mandal & Nitesh Saha, 2014. "Foreign Capital Inflow and Real Exchange Rate Appreciation in Developing Economies: Theory and Empirical Evidence," Global Economy Journal (GEJ), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 14(03n04), pages 453-465, October.
    5. Zhang, Kevin H., 2021. "How does South-South FDI affect host economies? Evidence from China-Africa in 2003–2018," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 690-703.
    6. Miao Miao & Qiaoqi Lang & Dinkneh Gebre Borojo & Jiang Yushi & Xiaoyun Zhang, 2020. "The Impacts of Chinese FDI and China–Africa Trade on Economic Growth of African Countries: The Role of Institutional Quality," Economies, MDPI, vol. 8(3), pages 1-20, June.
    7. Ongo Nkoa, Bruno Emmanuel & Tadadjeu, Sosson & Njangang, Henri, 2023. "Rich in the dark: Natural resources and energy poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    8. Elena Kopnova & Lilia Rodionova, 2017. "An Analysis of the Economic Determinants of Food Security in North Africa," HSE Working papers WP BRP 166/EC/2017, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    9. Sargis Karavardanyan, 2022. "Short-Term Harm, Long-Term Prosperity? Democracy, Corruption and Foreign Direct Investments in Sino-African Economic Relations," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 64(3), pages 417-486, September.
    10. Fofana Mory Fodé, 2014. "The Influence of Measures of Economic Freedom on FDI: A Comparison of Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa," Global Economy Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 14(3-4), pages 399-424, October.
    11. Mah Jai S., 2015. "Export Expansion and Economic Growth in Tanzania," Global Economy Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 15(1), pages 173-185, March.
    12. Matthias Busse & Ceren Erdogan & Henning Mühlen, 2016. "China's Impact on Africa – The Role of Trade, FDI and Aid," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 69(2), pages 228-262, May.
    13. Emma Serwaa Obobisa & Haibo Chen & Emmanuel Caesar Ayamba & Claudia Nyarko Mensah, 2021. "The Causal Relationship Between China-Africa Trade, China OFDI, and Economic Growth of African Countries," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(4), pages 21582440211, December.
    14. Yifang Wan & Yunxian Chen, 2022. "China’s Foreign Aid and Sustainable Growth of Recipient Countries: Mechanism and Evaluation," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(17), pages 1-17, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    China; Africa; FDI; growth; contribution;
    All these keywords.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:gejxxx:v:12:y:2012:i:04:n:1524-5861.1873. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/gej .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.