Volume 4, Issue 1-2, December 2017, Pages 61 - 74
Foreign direct investment, productivity and the technology gap in African economies
Authors
Christopher Malikanea, Christopher.Malikane@wits.ac.za, Prosper Chitambarab, *, prosper@ledriz.co.zw
aSchool of Economic and Business Sciences (SEBS), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
bLabour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe (LEDRIZ), Harare, Zimbabwe
*Corresponding author.
Corresponding Author
Prosper Chitambaraprosper@ledriz.co.zw
Received 15 October 2015, Revised 21 November 2017, Accepted 25 November 2017, Available Online 24 February 2018.
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.joat.2017.11.001How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- E22; F21; F23; O16
- Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of foreign direct investment on total factor productivity conditional on relative backwardness in a panel of 45 African countries over the period 1980–2012. We use two measures of relative backwardness, namely: the distance from technological frontier and the income gap. We apply the fixed-effects and two-step system GMM methods. We find a generally positive but weak effect of FDI on productivity growth. Meanwhile, the results do not support the convergence theory of Findlay (1978) and Wang and Blomstrom (1992), that relative backwardness would result in higher productivity growth via the adoption of foreign technologies.
- Copyright
- © 2017 Afreximbank. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc/4.0/).
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TY - JOUR AU - Christopher Malikane AU - Prosper Chitambara PY - 2018 DA - 2018/02/24 TI - Foreign direct investment, productivity and the technology gap in African economies JO - Journal of African Trade SP - 61 EP - 74 VL - 4 IS - 1-2 SN - 2214-8523 UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joat.2017.11.001 DO - 10.1016/j.joat.2017.11.001 ID - Malikane2018 ER -