Search results

This chapter aims to investigate and interpret China’s educational aid by analyzing its history, philosophies, and practices in Africa. The study is based on review and analysis of governmental documents, reports, academic papers, and news by Chinese and foreign scholars on China’s aid, particularly educational aid to Africa. The analysis unveils three transformations of China’s aid “from pro-ideology to de-ideology,” “from single area to multiple areas,” and “from pragmatic economy driven to sustainable and humane economy focused” in Africa. Meanwhile, it indicates a continuity of the philosophy of solidarity, morality, and reciprocity in China’s South-South cooperation with African educational development.

The analysis also shows China’s educational aid does not match well with the framework of the Western donors. China, under the FOCAC framework, is devoted to higher education cooperation, human resources training program, scholarship, and Chinese language education with African partners. With the growth of its economic and political influence, China will play multiple roles as the biggest developing country and as an active promoter and provider for South-South cooperation in the negotiation and construction of the post-2015 agenda. Nevertheless, we assume China will keep a pragmatic higher education cooperation with its developing country partners to inclusively link it with business, technology transfer, and people-to-people exchange.

This study delivers a comprehensive review and analysis of paradigm shift, philosophy, mechanism, and practice of China’s educational aid to Africa to fill up the literature gap in this field. It also timely presents China’s stance toward discussion on the post-2015 agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to examine China-Africa educational cooperation under the framework of Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) while illustrating the modalities of Sino-Africa educational cooperation.

Based on empirical and documentary analysis, the paper describes and explores the unique features of China-Africa educational cooperation.

In the past decades, China's expanding engagement with Africa in the field of international development assistance has attracted great attention and given rise to mixed reactions and arguments at the international level. China's cooperation with Africa has a long and notable history, dating back to the 1950s. China's cooperation with other developing countries is known as South-South development cooperation, based on principles of equality, mutual benefit, solidarity and no conditionality. With a thorough and critical analysis of the decision-making mechanism and the practices of China's educational cooperation with Africa, this paper puts forward some important issues regarding the perspective of sustainability and effectiveness in Chinese cooperative arrangements.

The paper tries to explain the dynamic and the practices of China's education engagement with Africa and puts forward key challenges regarding its effectiveness toward new strategic partnerships. However, the answers to these questions require some innovative measures in the future practices of China-Africa educational cooperation.

The China-Africa education partnership is not a stand-alone sector, which can be better understood in the context of the historical development of China-Africa cooperation and under the framework of the FOCAC.

China–Africa relations have come under scrutiny recently, with more articles and books having been written on it in the last 10 years than in the preceding 50 years all put together. Despite the generous attention, however, the nature and outcome of China–Africa relations are far from clear. It is, in fact, as though the more one reads about China in Africa, the less one knows about it. The empirical evidence seems to lend support to the twin claims that China is looting Africa and that it is developing the continent. The massive literature and seemingly contradictory perspectives about Africa–China relations thus cry out for a disciplinary framework, disciplinary in both senses of that term. What are the divergent perspectives about Afro–Chinese relations? How did they emerge? What are the driving forces behind them? Is the sustained discourse about Afro–Chinese relations justifiable on empirical grounds? And is it a good thing for Africa in any case? These questions are addressed in this essay from the perspective of social constructivism.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the effect of commodity exports from Africa to China on the growth rate of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) after controlling for variables that have been found to be important determinants of economic growth. This study uses a panel of 23 African countries for the period of 2001-2011.

The authors make use of a Barro-type empirical economic growth model which uses per capita GDP as the dependent variable. With regard to independent variables, the authors examine the China effect after controlling for variables that have been found to affect economic growth. To account for the China effect, we use the following three measures of trade with China: commodity export to China, commodity export to China relative to total export and commodity export to China relative to the world. The authors use panel data from 2001 to 2011.

Results indicate that the magnitudes of the effect, while statistically significant, are not large enough to induce positive growth rates. The results also indicate that the magnitudes of the effects depend on the colonial origin of the African countries.

The data are limited to the 2001-2011 time frame because of data availability issues. This time frame does capture the era when China increased its trade with Africa. The choices of variables were also affected by data availability. However, the authors managed to find data on the main drivers of economic growth. Further research is needed to gain a more comprehensive analysis of the effects of commodity trade with China on Africa’s economy, given the partial character of the data set used in this study. Similarly, there is also a need for more detailed information on China’s trade activities.

While the results of this study show an improvement in the per capita growth rate, the changes are not large enough to put African countries on a path to a sustained prosperity. African governments which trade with China should consider investing more in manufacturing, so that they create more jobs locally and benefit more from their exports.

The China–Africa relationship shows a small positive impact on societal well-being.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, none of the existing studies on China–Africa relations attempted to understand the impact of China’s economic activity on the standards of living of African residents, where standard of living is measured by economic growth. The current study aims to bridge this gap. This study complements existing studies and uses a data set and methodology that has not been used before on this issue.

This study examines the impact of China's trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) on Africa's global value chain (GVC) participation and economic upgrading.

The study covered 48 African countries, cutting across the western, eastern, central, southern and northern subregions to cover the heterogeneity of the continent. The study adopted feasible generalized least squares panel VAR-Granger causality Wald test and system generalized methods of moments techniques for estimation.

Overall, China's FDI to Africa and US-Africa trade have a linear relationship with Africa's GVC involvement and economic upgrading. The findings suggest that although China-Africa trade has a positive impact on GVC engagement and upgrading, the marginal effect decreases in the face of US-Africa and EU-Africa trade.

This study provides new evidence on the impact of China's FDI and trade on African economies' GVC participation and economic upgrading. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to empirically explore the effects of China's FDI and trade on Africa's GVC integration and economic upgrading as well as from the perspectives of backward and forward GVC participation. Furthermore, the study empirically examines whether the effects of Africa's economic cooperation with China relative to its GVC engagement differ from those of Europe (EU) and the US via a comparative regression.

This paper intends to provide a thematic literature review of the scholarly research articles orbiting the Sino–African education cooperation and exchange, published between 2005 and 2022.

The methodology used in this paper is qualitative in nature with a thematic approach. The author used content analysis techniques to spotlight the major themes of the topic studied. The author selected the papers and theses, based on their heuristic capacity, from two major databases for the English and Chinese literature: Web of Science and CNKI. The selection process resulted in 60 high-quality peer-reviewed articles and theses. Another 30 research articles and theses were used as supplementary resources.

The literature concentrates on six points: the historical development, the nature of the exchange, the frameworks of the cooperation, vocational training and knowledge transfer, African students in China and their experiences, and education cooperation and soft power. However, research tends to be somewhat polemical rather than an academic debate between Chinese researchers and their western peers. Therefore, empirical studies beyond the geopolitical preoccupations and the “YEA” or “NAY” to the Sino–African education exchange are critically needed.

The implications of this study go beyond the east/west or developed/developing world rhetoric and focus more on sustainable educational development on a global scale. Understanding how the literature on the Sino–African education engagement is shaping, provides valuable insights into international education in the global south. It can also be implied to approach educational engagement with other destinations such as India, Türkiye and Brazil.

This thematic literature review concentrates on the educational aspect of Sino–African relations. It compares English and Chinese peer-reviewed scholarly articles and theses on China–Africa educational engagement and has heuristic implications for sustainable educational development globally.

This paper aims to investigate China–Africa Investment link, using over two decades of FDI’s data. During the specified periods, African economic growth path has been predominantly upward trending, despite multiple external threats. This impressive growth was partly because of the growth of FDI stock across the region. This study explores the various sources of FDI to Africa, mainly China’s FDI’s and how they influence African macroeconomic indicators, i.e. unemployment, export and import activities.

Pesaran autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) is used as a framework to test the short-run and long-run relationship of indicators. Granger causality test checked the causality between growth and macroeconomic indicators.

The link between China’s FDI and African economic growth reported a negative/declining effect in both short and long run. In the long run, the effect of world FDI on growth was significant but not the in the short run. However, US FDI to Africa, China Export and Import from Africa reported an insignificant effect on growth. There was no evidence of Okun’s law, as a decrease in Africa unemployment does not increase growth. Overall, China’s FDI’s inflows to Africa are allocated to capital-intensive activities which has less labor employability. The Granger causality test reported a uni-directional link between growth and all series, except for human capital which experienced no link at all in all directions. Despite the issue of socio-infrastructure militating against growth in the region, African economy is likely to perform better, if more FDI’s are channeled into labor-intensive activities, because it has a reductive effect on unemployment.

The research considered point annual FDI data but not accumulated stock and is a macro-based study, i.e. regional economy.

This paper bridged the literature gap in African investment performance by providing an empirical justification in understanding the inflow of FDI, especially China. This is a useful guard in policy design and implementations in the attraction of the right type of investment, so as to reduce unemployment and promote growth.

The authors confirm that this study has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration in whole or in part by another journal.

This paper aims to examine the potential for “triangular cooperation” between investment partners from Australia, China and host African nations to contribute to the economic development in Africa.

The paper discusses a number of complementarities between Australian and Chinese investors in mining, agriculture, energy, research and education and finance – sectors vital to Africa’s future development. These complementarities are examined in light of recent development studies on the benefits of triangular cooperation and recent literature examining links between foreign direct investment (FDI) policy and economic development.

The paper concludes that there is much to be gained by making the most of the existing and potential synergies between Australian, Chinese and local investors in African settings.

The implications of this paper are, first, that African nations should keep the benefits of triangular cooperation in mind when designing FDI policies and, second, that Australian and Chinese investors should be more willing to explore potential investment partner synergies when investing in Africa. The paper also suggests an agenda for future research into how good design of FDI policies might best promote healthy economic development in African nations.

Australian and Chinese companies should be more willing to explore potential avenues for cooperation when investing in Africa, while African governments should be more mindful of how rules and policies can maximise the local benefits of FDI.

African governments should be more mindful of the quality, rather than the quantity of FDI when drafting relevant laws and policies.

The value of the paper is in applying the concept of “triangular cooperation” to direct investment. The paper also provides an original focus on Australia-China investment synergies in African settings.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the institutional structures and other predictors that determine bilateral trade between Africa and China from 1995 to 2017.

In line with the gravity model of trade, institutional, geographical and socio-economic determinants of China’s bilateral trade with 18 African oil/minerals exporting countries are examined by deploying Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood and dynamic bias-corrected least squares dummy variable econometric techniques.

The results indicate that China’s oil/minerals imports from Africa are higher than imports of manufacturing and agricultural goods, and institutional structures indicate that a weak politically stable region with less control of corruption has a discernible effect on trade.

Further insight can be gained if the type of manufactured goods being exported to China is examined; this is necessary given that China crowds out Africa’s manufactured goods. Therefore, this study recommends the need for Africa to continually strengthen its institutional structures to stimulate trade from other regions.

This study examines the quality of the institutional structures (political stability and corruption) in African oil/minerals exporting countries, considering that China has been alleged for capitalising on Africa’s weak institutional structures to trade with the resource-endowed region. For the first time, the UN COMTRADE HS product-country-partner-year trade data is used to examine on bilateral sector trade China–Africa links rather than proxies used in the studies of Biggeri and Sanfilippo (2009), De Grauwe et al. (2012) and Foad (2011) that did not capture the real trade value.