Each paper takes one question about capital and tests it against evidence: which institutions teach capital to behave, which let it avoid the lesson, and what a government can do about either.
Much of the debate about capital and Africa starts with how much is coming. This series starts with what capital does once it arrives, and with the institutions that decide the answer. Capital is not one thing. A loan, a grant, a remittance and a mining concession each arrive with different obligations. Some kinds need the receiving economy to change: its skills, its rules, its suppliers, its tax base. Others earn their return while the economy stays the same. The mix of those kinds, more than the total sum, shapes what a country builds and who benefits. In these papers, that mix is composition.
In this sense, composition determines whether a country learns from its investors or merely hosts them.
Each paper takes one question about capital and tests it against evidence: which institutions teach capital to behave, which let it avoid the lesson, and what a government can do about either. The papers are written for African policymakers, their advisers and the investors who want to understand what they finance.
Three things set the work apart. First, it begins with what capital requires, not with whether capital is good or bad. It does not denounce foreign investment, nor does it treat domestic capital as virtuous by default. Second, the evidence combines quantities with institutions. Doctoral research on US foreign direct investment in sub-Saharan Africa found regulatory quality to be the strongest predictor of where that capital went. Third, the author writes from inside development finance. He advises a development bank, and his career has run through trade policy and regional institutions. The papers are written in plain language, and they disclose the author’s institutional position where it bears on the argument.
The papers do not assume that African governments lack capital. They assume that many have not yet decided what capital should do for them. The aim is not to discourage capital, but to give readers better questions to ask of it. Start with the first paper, which asks why a country can receive large inflows of capital and still lack productive capacity.
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