Adnan Seric

When do multinational companies consider corporate social responsibility? A multi-country study in Sub-Saharan Africa

While African countries are becoming more and more relevant as host countries for suppliers of multinational companies little is known about corporate social responsibility (CSR) in this region. To fill this gap, the present article explores CSR considerations of foreign affiliates of multinational companies when choosing local African suppliers. The article suggests a model of three types of determinants, namely firm characteristics, exports, and intra‐trade. Analyses of a large‐scale and quite unique firm level data for more than 2,000 foreign owned firms in 19 sub‐Saharan African countries demonstrate that firms importing intermediates from their parent company abroad are more likely to implement CSR. Similarly, CSR plays a larger role for affiliates that export to developed countries. Different determinants affect environmental and social CSR activities.

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.

Determinants of intra-firm trade: Evidence from foreign affiliates in Sub-Saharan Africa

By exploiting a unique sample of foreign affiliates in Sub‐Saharan Africa, we study previously examined and unexamined firm‐level determinants of intra‐firm trade. We document that foreign affiliates engaging in intra‐firm trade are relatively few and that the majority of these also engage in trade at arms length, which accounts for an important fraction of their total trade. The identified firm‐level determinants of intra‐firm trade are consistent with property rights and intangible asset theories of the multinational firm, with international production hierarchy theories, as well as with theories of complex FDI and of multinational activity under credit constraints.

Diffusion of Labor Standards from Origin to Host Countries: Cross County Evidence from Multinational Companies in Africa

This study empirically examines diffusion of labor standards from origin to host countries by investigating whether better labor standards of MNCs’ origin countries are correlated with higher wages of workers in host countries in Africa. MNCs originating from countries with more rights of association and collective bargain and those coming from countries with unions that have strong wage bargaining power are found to pay significantly higher wages to their workers in host countries. These findings highlight that, although domestic policies and institutions may be important determinants of labor-related standards, they don’t operate in isolation from external influences coming from origin countries.

Spillovers from agglomerations and inward FDI. A Multilevel Analysis on SSA domestic firms

This paper adopts multilevel analysis to analyse the agglomeration-performance nexus for domestic firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. We show that contextual factors such as country, city and industry together explain up to 30% of the variance in firms’ productivity. Our results show also that African firms can take advantage from agglomeration externalities when they locate in cities more densely populated by firms specialized in different sectors (urbanization economies), while their performance worsen when they face direct competition from firms in the same industry. These effects are similar in the services and the manufacturing industries, even if in the latter positive spillovers are found to be conditional to the presence of backward and foreign linkages with nearby firms. Finally, we are also able to show that these effects are magnified when domestic firms locate close to foreign multinationals, especially those coming from the South.