The Heterogeneity of FDI in Sub-Saharan Africa How Do the Horizontal Productivity Effects of Emerging Investors Differ from Those of Traditional Players?

This paper analyzes the horizontal productivity effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) from industrialized and developing countries in 10 sub-Saharan African countries. We establish a unique data set by combining data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys that allow us to distinguish between foreign investors from sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. We find strong evidence of horizontal productivity spillovers to domestic firms derived from foreign-firm presence. However, these effects are clearly dependent on domestic firms' absorptive capacity. The largest productivity effects seem to be driven by investors from sub-Saharan Africa. Our analysis also shows that productivity effects differ according to the income level of host countries. Overall, the strongest productivity effects seem to materialize in lower-middle-income countries. These key findings emphasize the increasing importance of emerging investors, beyond the traditional players from industrialized countries, in sub-Saharan Africa

Cambodia's Special Economic Zones

This study examines the role of special economic zones (SEZs) within the trade policy of Cambodia. It asks whether Cambodia's establishment of SEZs since late 2005 has been successful, based on the evidence to date, and analyzes the appropriate role and management of SEZs over the next decade or more. The study finds that the SEZs have attracted significant levels of foreign investment into Cambodia that would not have been present otherwise. These investments have created around 68,000 jobs, with equal or better pay and better prospects than the alternatives that would otherwise have existed, raising the economic welfare of the workers concerned. A feature of the Cambodian experience is that the government has left the establishment and management of the zones to private sector developers, avoiding the large and sometimes wasteful public sector set up costs associated with SEZ establishment in many other countries

Biased FDI spillovers in incomplete datasets: An empirical examination

We examine biases in foreign direct investment (FDI) productivity spillovers that can arise when using incomplete datasets, by comparing estimates for Indonesia from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES)—an incomplete dataset example—with estimates from the Indonesian Manufacturing Survey (MS). Furthermore, we conduct estimations on samples drawn from MS, following the sampling methodology of WBES. We find that estimates with this sampling framework are inaccurate, due to measurement error in industry-level horizontal and vertical FDI, strong presence of small firms, and small sample size. Relaxing the WBES sampling criteria and using FDI variables from MS produces substantially more reliable findings

Changing Spatialities of Employment: Geographies of Industry and Services

Employment is the right to work, from the peculiar perspective of the spatial conditions and opportunities. Against the backdrop of the intense development of ICTs and their effects on labour, spaces, and socioeconomic dynamics, the terms “production” and “employment” need to be referred to economic activities, in which the separation between manufacturing, services, and retail sectors is increasingly blurred. The spatial dimension of the employment (the workplaces) is a crucial effect provided by both the spatial transformation of industrial spaces and services spaces, to the ongoing multifaceted urban and regional change transformation