Oluyomi Ola-David Insights

For those who know already and for others who may care to be informed, Africa is the next global engine of growth. The next civilization that will make the achievements of the West pale into insignificance is emerging from the hitherto 'third world'. You can safely engrave these words in gold. Africa and its national policy environments are becoming most favourable to foreign direct investments (FDIs) as against portfolio investments, because FDIs tend to be more value- and employment- creating than portfolio investments. Development literature also attest to the knowledge spillover and demonstration effects from the presence of foreign firms in domestic economies. Moreover, the launch of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area  signals a new trajectory for the Continent's contribution to global trade and value-chains. All these are signals to smart investors who may seek to gain a first-mover advantage in specified areas of goods and services delivery on the Continent.  It

Developing countries, usually considered ‘latecomers’ in development, can create learning opportunities for themselves through channels of knowledge diffusion and technology transfer such as international trade and foreign direct investment.  For instance, ownership-specific advantages of multinational corporations, which make up the majority of large corporations in developing countries, could spill over to the domestic environment through consciously built learning relationships (in forms of forward and backward linkages). Mauritius is an African success story of structural transformation resulting from export-oriented FDI stimulated through the creation of special economic zones. Now that foreign investment promotion has become central to the industrial policies of most African economies, it is important to evaluate how much of the positive trends in FDI inflows are associated with local learning and improvements in local ways of doing things. Put differently, is FDI to

By the 2014 rebasing of its GDP, Nigeria became Africa’s largest economy trumping its long time contender, South Africa. Amongst several things, the significant growth implies changes in the sectoral contribution of domestic output and employment. Conventionally, for a developing country context it is expected that international trade, foreign direct investment, industrial policy and global price fluctuations would have contributed to the shifts in the distribution of factors of production and final output. Given the uninclusive nature of the impressive surge in output, it is important to investigate what sectors accounted for the structural change. Using historical data on the Nigerian economy, Oyebanke and I examined (in a forthcoming paper) the contribution of foreign direct investment to structural transformation. Specifically, in the paper we provided answers to the following questions: What are the sources, nature and characteristics of the structural change