Foreign Direct Investments Inflow and Outflow in the Sub-regions of Africa and Its Trade with the World

Abstract

This study assessed and provides a holistic Literature review of the flow of investment and the analysis on South Africa and Morocco imports and exports. By examining the impact and projections of Africa's trade contribution to the world's development through the export and import of merchandise trade, it was realized that, Africa trading trends in the United States and the Europeans have changed currently and rather, there has been a diversification in export and import trade destination by the African continent. Africa's trading with the European Union has been switched to the Asian continent with China now the largest trading partner in Africa after the world economic crises in 2008. Secondary data from accredited sources were used for this research and five demographic, social and economic countries from the Northern, Southern, Eastern, Central and Western zones of the Africa continent were used in understudying the aim of this paper/research. The inflow of foreign direct investment into the African continent is mostly from the developed countries, international bodies, the European Union and some of the fastest developing economies on the Asian continent. However, the outflow of FDI is lower as a result of most of the countries in Africa depending heavily on the inflow of foreign direct investment as their main source of development of their economies thereby focusing less on outward investments. The results highlights South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, Angola and Morocco to continue to be top five (5) home economies of outward FDI in Africa. Therefore, since the continuous increase in investment in Africa as proven to be of favorable conditions and the benefits investors receives from the continent and Investment attraction among other factors were noted, the need of sound investment policies among other factors to entice many investors into the continent are recommended. Index Terms-FDI, business-friendly, foreign investors, trade deficits, Africa and Ecowas.

The effects of foreign direct investment on youth unemployment in the Southern African Development Community

“…An investigation of the employment effects of FDI has been an area of great concern over the past years since among other reasons countries attract FDI to boost employment. In the SADC region, youth unemployment is high, while at the same time the region receives the largest percentage share of FDI inflow followed by West Africa, North Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa respectively (Evans et al 2018). The sectoral distribution of FDI in Southern Africa shows significant increases in services (tourism and telecommunications) and mining and quarrying where high-skilled labour is required (Muradzikwa 2002).…”

“…In their study in the SADC, Lederman et al (2010) found that trader openness was more important than market size. However, they did not go further to analyse the impact of FDI on youth unemployment which remains a challenge despite having a large share of the continent's FDI inflows (Muradzikwa 2002;SADC 2003;Evans et al 2018;Kapingura 2018). This, therefore, leaves an open question on the effects of FDI on youth unemployment in the SADC region.…”

Human development, corruption control, and foreign direct investment revisited: the case of sub-Saharan Africa

“…For one reason or the other, sub-Saharan Africa has not been the favourite of most investors in the world of foreign investment. One of these reasons could be that the sub-Saharan African region has seen a lot of civil unrest, corruption, and political instability, corporate governance issues in the past decade (Evans et al, 2018;Odusola, 2019;Agbokah et al, 2022). Although other research on these factors is inconclusive, they stand a great chance as a reason enough.…”