Foreign Direct Investment and Structural Change in Africa: Does Origin of Investors Matter?

The African continent represents the new frontier of global investment flows. The size and geographical coverage of FDI in the continent are steadily increasing with a rather peculiar balance of ‘old’ investors (from OECD countries) and ‘new’ ones (from emerging economies). The goal of this chapter is twofold. First, we discuss the relative importance of traditional OECD investors and ‘new’ investors from BRICS from a macro-level perspective. Second, we use an original micro-level data (African Investor Survey 2010, by UNIDO) to compare these two groups of investors in terms of their development potential. Our analysis sheds novel light on the heterogeneous development impact of FDI in Africa and addresses important policy implications for the attraction of foreign investors into the continent