Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

We compare the performance of Northern and Southern multinationals in Sub-Saharan Africa, and contrast it with local firms in the host country. Employing unique firm level data for 19 Sub-Saharan African countries, we show that firms receiving FDI outperform domestic ones, while the origin of...

This paper assesses the potential for skilled labor migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. It utilizes representative surveys from Ghana and Kenya to shed light on the quality and distribution of skills in the labor markets of these countries. Skills in both countries are found to be...

This paper studies the relationship between Asia’s economic engagements in Africa and individual African nations’ participation in global value chains (GVC) over the past two decades. We find that while overall exports from Africa to Asia are still highly concentrated in resource-intensive...

This paper investigates the effects of oil financed public investment on poverty using a dynamic multisectoral general equilibrium model featuring inter-temporal productivity spillovers, which may exhibit a sector-specific and regional bias. In general, the results bear out the expectation that...

The development of the agricultural sector and the improvement of the food security situation are seen as essential components to sustainable development in Africa. However, continuing population growth, impacts of climate change and environmental degradation add to an unprecedented combination...

Large-scale agricultural land acquisitions might entail substantial welfare implications for the affected rural population. Whether the impacts are indeed as devastating as the popular notion of "land grabs" would suggest depends on a number of factors, including the size of compensation...

The regional allocation of aid within recipient countries has been largely ignored in the aid allocation literature. We use geocoded data on the location of aid projects financed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank within a sample of 27 recipient countries to assess the claim of...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of a prominent place-based policy - Special Economic Zones (SEZs) - on the economic well-being of African households. We compile a novel dataset on repeated cross-sections of households living in various distance bands around SEZs in 10...