Background: In the last two decades, the world experienced two overlapping global shocks – that is, the 2008–2009 financial crisis and the COVID-19 lockdowns – with severe social and economic consequences on African economies that have, once again, brought to the fore the intricate role that globalisation plays in economic growth because of grave risks that often accompany it.Aim: We consider three research questions about globalisation: (i) does globalisation heighten economic growth? (ii) is there a statistically significant threshold level of globalisation above which globalisation affects growth differently than at lower levels? (iii) what factors moderate the globalisation-economic growth nexus?Setting: A panel of 47 selected countries from Africa from 2001 to 2018 is under scrutiny.Method: To begin, it applies an overlapping five-year moving average (MA) to smoothen the data. In addition, we employ the revised globalisation index and the two-step systems generalised method of the moment (GMM) in its empirical strategy.Results: We find a largely insignificant relationship between globalisation and economic growth. We attribute these results to Africa’s infinitesimal share – less than 5% – in foreign direct investment (FDI) and global trade, acute infrastructure deficit and the lack of relevant skills that lead to productivity losses and weak performance within the international business ecosystem. We also find, among others, that globalisation is more effective in countries with more gross capital formation, higher population and urban growth rates.Conclusion: For Africa to maximise its growth potential from globalisation, sound policies should be put in place to promote trade, FDI, domestic capital formation and urbanisation. We suggest that future studies investigate the long-run equilibrium relationship between globalisation and economic growth.

Africa continues to face several challenges that make its share of global foreign direct investment (FDI) to be infinitesimal. These include the prevalence of fragmented investment policies, information asymmetry and high sovereign risk. Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) can help overcome some of these encumbrances by signalling the host country's willingness to protect FDIs. This study hypothesizes that BITs can play an augmentation role and investigates their impact on FDI attraction using data across 48 African countries from 2000 to 2018. In contrast to the previous theoretical and most empirical literature, results based on the two-step systems generalized method of moments (GMM) show that ratified BITs do not perform a significant role in FDI attraction. Nonetheless, the additional analyses allowed us to make some rather non-trivial conclusions about the possible effects of BITs concluded with France on FDI. The study recommends that countries should participate in some BITs, although governments need to be cautious when tying their hands with BITs because of susceptibility to damaging litigations that sometimes follow, irrespective of the less than commensurate benefits.

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Radical economic transformation has come to mean many different things to many different people. In recent political discourse, the concept has been utilised to symbolise the government’s commitment to fast-track changes in the structure of the economy, particularly from the perspective of revisiting the ownership of wealth and resources. When loosely used, the term somehow confers upon government the agency to ensure that the ownership structure of the economy should be transformed (radically) in a manner that changes the structure and pace of economic development and fulfils the aspirations of the National Development Plan. This paper argues that the idea of radicalised economic transformation is a contested one, because economic transformation can hardly be radicalised in the sense that is being communicated in the mainstream discourse. The transformation of any economy requires painstaking mechanical and systematic remodelling of certain push pillars within several sectors, of which the higher education sector is key. Radicalising the process of economic transformation in South Africa could hardly be achieved without radical steps to transform the role, contribution and output of the higher education sector. The construction of an economic development project that brings about sustainable, meaningful improvements would require much more than a rhetoric commitment to the romantic notion of radical economic transformation. It will require dealing with built-in weaknesses of the system and picking seed pillars with a potential to inject radical change into the broader economy. It is the key argument of this paper that radicalising the transformation of the higher education sector is the real prerequisite to radical economic transformation, especially when such transformation targets more than the racial profile of university staff to also focus on output, efficiency and global competitiveness.