Curse or blessing? multinational corporations and labor market outcomes in Africa

Do multinational enterprises create local job opportunities in developing countries? We address this question in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa by combining information on domestic and foreign multinationals’ affiliates over more than a decade with geolocalised individual-level data on labor supply. Having a multinational’s affiliate within walking distance correlates with an increase in employment of about +4% with respect to the sample mean. Multinationals’ activity is correlated with higher off–farm and lower on–farm employment (+13% and −7%, respectively), a result driven by affiliates of foreign companies. Female employment and "good jobs" increase around affiliates, but only when they are part of foreign groups. A battery of robustness checks and a retrospective analysis exploiting time variation in the individual labor market entry deliver qualitatively similar results, suggesting our findings do not suffer major identification issues.