Resumen de Cross-border bank lending versus FDI in Africa's growth story

Jose Brambila Macias, Isabella Massa, V. Murinde

• We investigate the relative long run growth impact of each of the two main types of Africa's private capital inflows, namely Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Cross-Border Bank Lending (CROSSBANK). In addition to controlling for some factors (e.g. financial reforms and trade openness), we isolate the outcomes for four groups: (1) all the African economies; (2) all the African economies except the SANE (South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria and Egypt), which are considered Africa's growth dynamos; (3) natural resource countries, which include some of the SANE and (4) countries without a sizeable hydrocarbon endowment. Our evidence suggests that both FDI and CROSSBANK exert a positive impact on African countries as a whole; an interesting comparison is that consistently, the former has a larger impact than the latter. Moreover, the effect of CROSSBANK becomes negative when the sample is restricted to oil countries. Also, financial reforms have a positive impact on economic growth in nonoil countries, while they have no growth effect on oil countries. The importance of trade openness as a driver of economic growth is confirmed for all African countries.