Foreign direct investment, productivity and the technology gap in African economies

Christopher Malikane and Prosper Chitambara ()
Additional contact information
Prosper Chitambara: Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe (LEDRIZ)

Journal of African Trade, 2017, vol. 4, issue 1, 61-74

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Foreign direct investment; Total factor productivity; Technology gap; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E22 F21 F23 O16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1016/j.joat.2017.11.001 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jouafr:v:4:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1016_j.joat.2017.11.001

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.atlantis-press.com/journals/jat

DOI: 10.1016/j.joat.2017.11.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Trade is currently edited by Svetlana Zakharchenko

More articles in Journal of African Trade from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().