Abstract (eng)
China’s actions in Africa have attracted great international attention during recent years and its engagement on the continent is commonly described as either an altruistic move or as only being targeted at exploiting abundant African natural resources and local labour. This thesis goes beyond these highly polarized views of China-Africa relations and seeks to offer a more balanced and data-driven analysis of Chinese investment in Africa with the aim of understanding its influence on the economic development of the continent. To this end, this work analyses official Chinese data - drawn from the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China (MOFCOM) - and investigates the patterns of Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa between the years 2004 and 2017. Noticeably, these data show that China’s investment in Africa is increasingly moving into productive sectors rather than into natural resource extraction, with a major focus lying on infrastructure and manufacturing. As a result, China’s FDI in Africa could hence lead to the creation of jobs on the continent and advance its development. Yet for this to happen, African countries will need to develop the ability to capitalise on China’s engagement by enacting pragmatic and tailored policies that can channel this potential towards the industrial transformation of the continent. A case study on Ethiopia will help to illustrate this argument.