Abstract:
Official Development Aid (ODA) roughly represents 6% of the overall financial exchanges (trade, FDI, capital flight) between Africa and the Western world – and even a smaller percentage of the overall exchanges between Africa and China. The talk will explore the remainder of the Europe - Africa relationship, looking into the nature of trade (commodities and services); investments (nature and sectors) and international agreements, to conclude that most of these exchanges are limiting the opportunities to create endogenous growth in Africa. Influences over Africa coming from the systemic level (IMF; WB; WTO) and from a number of domestic policies in the Western world (State subsidies, migration policies) seem also doing little to encourage capital accumulation, industrialization, economic diversification and value-adding activities in the poor, commodity-led economies of Africa. While any evaluation of the recent Chinese activism in Africa is still premature, there is little ground on which to expect Beijing to dramatically incentivize African growth. History from XIII Century Europe to 1990s China has instead shown that economic development is often achieved at the expenses of and in competition to foreign interests, and that the same set of policies adopted by these countries will likely represent the only credible path for Africa.
* All students taking the Research Colloquium course must attend. Other staff and students are also welcome.
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