Essays On The Impact Of Foreign Direct Investments In West Africa

The objective of this thesis is to analyze the effect of foreign direct investment and Chinese FDI inflows on West Africa's economic growth,trade(or exports)and agricultural development.Analyses aim at studying the determinants of FDI inflows and impact and their relationship with trade(or exports)and economic growth using Pooled Mean Group(PMG)and the Vector Error Correction Model(VECM)between 1980 and 2014 for a sample of 16 developing countries in West Africa.We've also empirically tested the relationship between foreign direct investment(FDI),economic growth and export in host countries that is known to have an important role in economic literature suffering from unemployment problems and lack of technological progress.Given that these countries are at different stages of growth,we explored this issue by applying the Pooled Mean Group(PMG)and the Granger causality test in the period 1980 to 2014 by using panel data,studying empirically tests in order to determine the impacts of Chinese FDI inflows on economic growth using panel data from 16 countries over the period of 2003–2015 in West Africa.We analysed the impacts of FDI inflows on agricultural sector and their relationship with economic growth using ARDL co-integration approach and causality test between 1980 and 2016 for Mali.The main goal of the present study is to discover empirically the relationship between foreign direct investment(FDI)and economic growth and it will also highlight the relationship positions between the variables included in the model,either long or short-run in case of Mali.The size and growth of market,total reserves,currency depreciation and trade openness of West Africa attract FDI inflows.In addition,to FDI-led growth and exports-led growth nexus,it is yet discover that exports and FDI inflows had a significant impact on economic growth in West African region during the period of interest.Moreover,the results points out that Chinese FDI most presumably have a significant impact on the agricultural sector of West African countries.However,some studies found that China FDI does not cause economic growth.Our results also show that there is no significant Panel-VECM Granger causality from either,China FDI to economic growth,or from economic growth to Chinese FDI,nor from agricultural to economic growth and from economic growth to agricultural.In terms of agricultural sector,the results show that the low level of labour force did not limit the impact of FDI,and that the contribution of FDI on agricultural sector was negative or non-India significant during the period from 1980 to 2016,while positive during the period from 2003 to 2015.Furthermore,the ARDL empirical result clearly indicates that FDI inflows have a significantly positive impact on the economic growth of Mali as well as other variables like domestic investment and exchange rate.As regarding the existence of FDI-related trade openness,it is found that FDI inflows promote innovation and developed production technology in local firms competing against multinational firms.This implies that the increment in Chinese FDI inflows would definitely lead to increasing the economic growth,domestic investment and agricultural land in West Africa.