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This paper calculates the trade efficiency of China's exports to Africa by considering trade inefficiency factors, such as Chinese aid to Africa and Chinese contracted projects. Based on a stochastic frontier gravity model and data for China's exports to 38 African countries from 2010 to 2020, this study draws the following conclusions. First, trade inefficiencies, such as China's aid and contracted projects, play a positive role in promoting China's export trade to Africa. Second, the efficiency of China's export trade to Africa varies significantly in different regions, among which countries with high export trade efficiency are concentrated in North and South Africa. Third, the trade potential and trade expansion space of China's exports to Africa vary significantly among different product sectors, which provides much space for promoting trade policy. We highlight that China's government should develop differentiated regional trade policies due to regional heterogeneity in terms of export trade efficiency between China and African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's trade with South Africa has become more important in recent years, and a SACU-China free trade agreement has been proposed to further strengthen this trade relationship. This paper examines the relevance of this proposed trade policy for further enhancing bilateral trade flows and development in SACU. The paper finds that tariff liberalization alone is inadequate for successful trade integration, as it benefits mostly South Africa only and harms some of SACU's internal and external trade and its welfare through trade diversion. Measures to improve trade complementarity, reduce barriers to intra-industry trade, and implement parallel MFN trade liberalization should also be undertaken by SACU in order to achieve successful trade integration with China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's relationship with Africa has grown exponentially over the last decade with US$95 billion in bilateral trade in 2008 and US$5.4 billion of Chinese investment in Africa for the same year. The growth of Sino-African relations also has an impact on the role of traditional development partners in Africa in particular in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which has already led some traditional development partners to reduce their aid budgets and subsequently their Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows to Africa. The objective of this paper is to analyse different development cooperation modalities in Africa of traditional development partners and China. This requires identifying trends in aid, debt relief, general budget support, trade, preferential trade access, and investment flows of both traditional development partners and China. The paper advocates that complementarities can be built between these development modalities on a national, regional and global level. This would enhance development effectiveness, increase efficiency and create win-win situations which would be beneficial to African countries, China and traditional development partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign direct investment (FDI) plays an important role in the socio‐economic advancement of developing countries. In the last decade, FDI inflows from China into Côte dʼIvoire have grown rapidly. Using quarterly time series data from 2003Q1 to 2017Q4, this study probes if China FDI has any significant welfare impact on the citizens of Côte dʼIvoire vis‐à‐vis if a causal relationship exists. The policy outcome is to stimulate further discourse that will reduce poverty and enhance the living standard of the population. The study uses vector autoregressive (VAR) and the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) modification of the non‐Granger causality test to determine if a causal relationship exists and the direction of causality. The empirical analysis provides evidence of a unidirectional causality from China FDI to social welfare (proxied by the human development index [HDI]) but no indication of causality between China FDI to economic welfare (proxied by real gross domestic product per capita [GDPPC]). This study, which is borne out of empirical curiosity, fills a lacuna in the FDI literature. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is a novel contribution that examines the FDI‐welfare nexus between China and a developing economy like Côte dʼIvoire. Thus, policies that will further stimulate FDI inflows from China must be carefully crafted to attract funding to the most productive sectors of the economy in order to improve both social and economic welfare. By extension, the policies may be adapted by developing economies with similar characteristics to Côte dʼIvoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last thirty years, remarkable achievements have been made in China's poverty reduction course. The dramatic fall in China's poor can be attributed mainly to a high rate of economic growth, government poverty reduction policies and targeted programmes and pro-poor macroeconomic and industrial policies. This paper focuses on China's poverty reduction policies and programmes and their impact on the poor regions and poor households. Lessons are drawn for poverty reduction and economic development in African countries. The paper also explores the potential for collaboration in poverty reduction between China and African countries and recommendations are made for the governments and donor agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I perform Arellano-Bond GMM estimations using panel data over the period 1995-2008 and explore the growth effects of Africa's trade with China, distinguishing between the effect of imports and the effect of exports, and controlling for the role of export concentration. Four important results are obtained from the empirical analysis. First, there is no empirical evidence that exports to China enhance growth unconditionally. Second, the results suggest that export concentration enhances the growth effects of exporting to China, implying that countries which export one major commodity to China benefit more (in terms of growth) than do countries that have more diversified exports. Third, contrary to the widely held view that increasing imports from China would have a negative effect, the empirical results show that the share of China in a country's total imports has a robust positive effect on growth. Finally, the evidence suggests that there is an inverted-U relationship between exports to developed countries and growth in Africa. Overall, the results seem to provide support for the hypothesis of growth by destination (i.e., that where a country exports matters for the exporting country's growth and development). I draw on these findings to outline some policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China, once a major recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI), has recently become one of the main 'emerging' investors, especially in developing countries. Chinese Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) plays a very prominent role in economic interaction with many African countries. This paper empirically investigates the determinants of Chinese OFDI versus 41 African countries over the period 1998-2007. The analysis is novel because it provides empirical support to the existing, so far purely anecdotic, evidence describing Chinese FDI to Africa as driven by natural resources endowments and market potential. The econometric analysis highlights strong interrelationships between Chinese FDI and economic cooperation, which make standard models of investments unfit when assessing the role of China in Africa. It also suggests some new lines of research, exploiting the strong links between these different sources of financing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the global financial and economic crisis, China has continued to experience strong export-driven growth and, indeed, became the world's largest exporting country in 2009. This rise of China in international markets presents African countries with growing competition in their home and export markets, but also with new opportunities. This paper focuses on the impacts of these developments on countries in North Africa, which are directly affected by the prominence of Chinese manufacturing. In particular, the analysis addresses two policy questions: First, is competition from China leading to substantial displacement of resources that incur significant adjustment costs while moving to new activities, or are there opportunities to exploit finer patterns of specialization that entail less disruption? And second, will policies that mitigate the impact of competition from China limit the longer-term capacity to exploit new opportunities in the global market? The findings from the empirical analysis suggest that policy makers can support North African producers in the increasingly fierce competition with China by reviewing the regulatory and incentives environment, reducing trade logistics costs, and broadening trade promotion efforts to non-traditional markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether trade between China and sub-Saharan Africa results in productivity-enhancing technology transfers to sub-Saharan African manufacturing firms. As trade flows between countries potentially results in interactions that lead to technological improvements in the production of goods and services, we parameterize the level of total factor productivity for African manufacturing firms as a function of foreign direct investment flow, and for the country in which it operates, trade openness with China, and its interaction with foreign direct investment. With micro-level data on manufacturing firms in five sub-Saharan African countries, we estimate the parameters of firm-level production functions between 1992 and 2004. Our parameter estimates reveal that across the firms and countries in our sample, there is no relationship between productivity-enhancing foreign direct investment and trade with China. In addition, increasing trade openness with China has no effect on the growth rate of total factor productivity. To the extent that total factor productivity and its growth is a crucial determinant of economic growth and living standards in the long run, our results suggest that increasing trade openness with China is not a long-run source of higher living standards for sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address two major questions. First, the question of whether China and India are displacing the African manufacturing export from the third market. Second, whether there is an evidence of shifting comparative advantage from China and India to Africa. We employed a gravity model with a panel data using 13 African exporters of clothing and accessories for the period 1995–2005 to answer the first question. To answer the second question, we used a flying-geese model and estimated Spearman's rank correlation coefficients on indices of the revealed comparative advantage vectors of the African exporters and China and India for the same period. Both the gravity and flying-geese models predicted similar outcomes. We found that there is strong evidence that China has been displacing African manufactures from the third market while India has been complementing it in the early years of the study. However, the overall third market impact of China and India has been that of complementarity in the later years of the study period. This result is found to vary across countries. Furthermore, we found evidence of shifting comparative advantage from China and India to Africa as the flying-geese theory predicts, South Africa being the leading goose followed by Kenya. The major implication of the study is that, in the world where China and India are reshaping the global economic order dynamically, the outcomes of the traditionally received wisdom of trade liberalization and industrialization policies through export promotion may be uncertain and requires strategic thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since generating sustained economic growth in Africa remains one of the most pressing challenges to development, it is imperative that Africa-specific determinants of economic growth are investigated. At the same time, in spite of recent slight slowdown, China's economic growth and its capacity to move in thirty years from underdevelopment and extreme poverty to an emerging global economic power had attracted the attention of many developing countries, including those in Africa. Some key questions arise: Can China serve as a growth model for Africa? And what lessons can we draw from the Chinese experience of soaring economic growth? We therefore investigate the determinants of economic growth in Africa (North and sub-Saharan Africa), using an Africa-only sample with five non-overlapping three-year averages of cross-sectional data between 1996 and 2010. We also do the same for China for the period, 1980 to 2010, while discussing recent trade, investment and aid/debt relations between Africa and China. Our results suggest that domestic investment, net ODA inflows, education, government effectiveness, urban population, and metal prices positively and significantly affect Africa's economic growth. For China, the key factors driving its economic growth are domestic investment, trade openness, initial income, and rural share of the population. Factors driving down China's growth include inflation rate, domestic credit to the private sector, net ODA inflows, population growth, telephone density, and oil and agricultural/raw materials prices. One key finding is that while Africa is almost twice as open as China, openness does not positively and significantly affect Africa's growth, unlike in China. A principal source is that Africa imports (mainly consumer goods) more than it exports while the reverse is true for China. Moreover, the structure of Africa's exports is biased towards traditional primary commodity exports unlike China that has rapidly shifted towards manufactures. In addition, Chinese domestic investment is about double that of Africa. The key lessons for Africa from the soaring Dragon's experience are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analytically examines the structure and characteristics of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and African trade networks by applying network analysis techniques through a critical and in‐depth description of the international trade of Eastern African countries as part of the world trade network. Sixty‐four countries' trade flow data between 2000 and 2018 from the International Monetary Fund, was used, and the network indices indicate that the BRI significantly enhances the trade network's connectivity. The empirical results indicate that density, the degree of centralization, and average node intensity are typically growing, and China is in the central position of the network. Furthermore, East African intra‐regional trade tends to be more densely connected under the BRI. This, in effect, demonstrates that the BRI countries have experienced a rise in intra‐regional trade at different levels of economic development. Therefore, this study recommends that policymakers should consider the BRI's critical role in reforming trade policies to build a resilient and sustainable African economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]