Essays on foreign direct investment institutions output efficiency and economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa countries (SSA)

The main motivation of this thesis is to contribute to the literature and deepen our understanding of economic growth in a wide variety of countries. Explaining the course of economic growth and determine factors that might affect it, have been for a long time, and continue to be, one of the most important topics of economic literature. This thesis provides a survey and synthesis of econometric tools that have been employed to study economic growth. While these tools range across a variety of statistical methods, they are united in the common goals of first, contributing to our understanding of the empirical work on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa economies. Second, the study quantifies the empirical relationship between Output FDI, institutions, efficiency and productivity and a wide array of factors using data over the last 41years. The first chapter is the introduction; the second chapter is an overview of Sub-Saharan Africa. The empirical analysis of the research can be categorized into three main chapters. In the first chapter (Chapter 3), Complementarity versus Substitutability: FDI and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa countries are investigated to examine the degree of complementarity between FDI and domestic capital and the level of absorptive capacity of the host countries. In the second chapter (Chapter 4), Output and Institutions are investigated to examine whether institutional development is a determinant of output per worker and productivity growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. The last chapter of empirical analysis (Chapter 5), The Role of Political and Economic Institutions on National efficiency: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, examines the role political and economic institutions play in promoting national efficiency and thus economic development. And Chapter 6 concludes the study.