Foreign Direct Investment, Employment and Wages in Sub-Saharan Africa

Job creation is one of the main challenges for developing countries. The aim of this paper is to analyse the relation between foreign ownership and employment using an original firm-level dataset that covers 19 sub-Saharan African countries. Our results show that although foreign firms are generally larger than local ones, the employment they generate is relatively more unskilled labour intensive compared with that generated by domestic firms. We discover substantial differences between foreign investors from the north and the south, in terms of both skill intensity and wage premiums. We also find that, ceteris paribus, Chinese firms employ more workers (mostly blue-collar workers) and pay lower wages for both skilled and unskilled workers compared with both domestic firms and other foreign investors. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.