Attracting Foreign Direct Investment into Sub-Saharan Africa

When it comes to attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) Africa as a whole may be described as something like the “forgotten continent.” In a global comparison, the continent is fairly insignificant as a destination for investment by foreign companies. This chapter makes this point using aggregate data on worldwide FDI stocks. It then tries to explain why this is the case. It first reviews, the important drivers of FDI that have been identified in the literature and then compares the performance of African countries in terms of those determinants with that of other potential host countries.