Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)

There is no gainsaying the fact that Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) constitute a major impediment to Africa’s sustainable development. In fact, IFFs have a direct impact on a country’s ability to raise, retain and mobilise its own resources to finance sustainable development. Its negative impact further includes draining a country’s foreign exchange reserves, reducing domestic resource mobilization, preventing the flow of benefits of foreign direct investment, and worsening insecurity, poverty and economic inequality.

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

November 10, 2022

Investments for women in digital finance

There is a relationship between Foreign direct investment (FDI) and gender (in)equality. This relationship is premised on two assumptions. The first is that FDI contributes to gender equality, and the second is that FDI may indeed be the shackle to gender equality. The first assumption is more popular than the second as its reality is more visible to the public compared to the second. In evaluating the first assumption, it is undeniable that FDI is one of the factors that contribute to the economic growth of a country as it adds to a country’s capital stock. Studies have shown a positive relation between FDI and the Gender Development Index (GDI). Based on these studies, an inference is drawn that there is an increase in gender equality as a result of more FDI

We hope the papers in this symposium will contribute to the ongoing efforts worldwide to achieve epistemological and methodological diversity in the IEL discipline. As a new Forum, we aim to remain flexible, experimental and responsive to the changing landscape in IEL. We will like to take this opportunity to thank the academics who have supported the Academic Forum over the last two years. We hope we can continue to count on your support as we devise robust and practical ways to decolonise and pluralise IEL research, scholarship and practice as a counterpoint to the dominant Western-centric IEL imagination.

In a 2018 paper, Casella and Formenti rely on work undertaken by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to illustrate the differences between the FDI patterns observed among large multinational enterprises (MNEs) depending on their ‘internet intensity’. They map UNCTAD’s digital framework into a conceptual matrix positioning digital categories on the basis of their internet intensity (the internet intensity matrix or IIM), along two dimensions: production and operations, on the one hand, and commercialization and sales, on the other. The IIM distinguishes between purely digital multinational enterprises, non-digital MNEs and a group of ‘mixed model’ MNEs which falls somewhere between the two extremes. Their subsequent analysis and findings is where things get interesting: as it turns out, digital MNEs have a share of foreign sales that is more than 2.5 times the share of foreign assets compared to traditional, non-digital MNEs. In other words, digital firms do not tend to invest a great deal in markets abroad in order to secure foreign sales. This is despite the fact that many of the world’s largest digital MNEs often make in excess of half of their sales abroad.

Electricity security is in today’s world a critical component for a well-functioning economy. Many African countries rely heavily on fossil fuels for electricity generation, while others have successfully harnessed renewable energy sources – Kenya being an example, with over 80% of its power generation being from renewable energy sources. With the global push to de-carbonise national economies, particularly the power sector, the interdependence of countries through electricity trade will become increasingly important. Countries are now only looking to develop their own clean energy capacity, but will in future, also seek to harness that of neighouring countries through cross-border power trade.

One of the lessons of the sovereign debt crisis spurred by the COVID-19 global pandemic is that China now plays an outsize role in the African economy, having displaced Western governments and key international organizations to become Africa’s largest bilateral creditor, source of foreign direct investment, and trading partner. After four years of not-so benign neglect Washington’s attention is again focused on Africa, largely to curb the rising influence of China on the continent. However, the United States may discover that in this 21st century “scramble for Africa” many states have already chosen to align their economic interests with Beijing, with serious implications for Washington’s position at the apex of the global financial order. Nowhere is this more clear than in China’s unveiling of its e-currency, the digital yuan, and the potential it has for helping displace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.