Publication: Do Capital Inflows Boost Growth in Developing Countries?: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
Loading...
Published
2015-06
ISSN
Date
2015-07-16
Author(s)
Calderon, Cesar
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper examines whether domestic output growth helps attract capital inflows and, in turn, capital inflows help boost output growth in a set of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using a two-step approach to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues, the paper finds that output growth in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa does not attract capital inflows. However, aid and foreign direct investment inflows enhance growth, while sovereign debt inflows do not. A 1 percent increase in the level of real aid inflows raises growth of real output per capita by 0.022 percentage point. For foreign direct investment inflows, the figure is 0.002 percentage point.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Calderon, Cesar; Nguyen, Ha. 2015. Do Capital Inflows Boost Growth in Developing Countries?: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa. Policy Research working paper,no. WPS 7298;; Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7298. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22171 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Economic Value of Weather Forecasts: A Quantitative Systematic Literature Review(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-10)This study systematically reviews the literature that quantifies the economic benefits of weather observations and forecasts in four weather-dependent economic sectors: agriculture, energy, transport, and disaster-risk management. The review covers 175 peer-reviewed journal articles and 15 policy reports. Findings show that the literature is concentrated in high-income countries and most studies use theoretical models, followed by observational and then experimental research designs. Forecast horizons studied, meteorological variables and services, and monetization techniques vary markedly by sector. Estimated benefits even within specific subsectors span several orders of magnitude and broad uncertainty ranges. An econometric meta-analysis suggests that theoretical studies and studies in richer countries tend to report significantly larger values. Barriers that hinder value realization are identified on both the provider and user sides, with inadequate relevance, weak dissemination, and limited ability to act recurring across sectors. Policy reports rely heavily on back-of-the-envelope or recursive benefit-transfer estimates, rather than on the methods and results of the peer-reviewed literature, revealing a science-to-policy gap. These findings suggest substantial socioeconomic potential of hydrometeorological services around the world, but also knowledge gaps that require more valuation studies focusing on low- and middle-income countries, addressing provider- and user-side barriers and employing rigorous empirical valuation methods to complement and validate theoretical models.Publication It’s Not (Just) the Tariffs: Rethinking Non-Tariff Measures in a Fragmented Global Economy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-10-22)As tariffs have declined, non-tariff measures (NTMs) have become central to trade policy, especially in high-income countries and regulated sectors like food and green technologies. Although NTMs may serve legitimate goals, they could also sort countries and firms into or out of markets based on compliance capacity and differences in product mix. Documenting recent advances in the estimation of ad valorem equivalents (AVEs), this paper uncovers new patterns of use and exposure of NTMs. High-income countries rely more heavily on NTMs relative to tariffs, while low- and middle-income countries face steeper AVEs on their exports. Firm-level evidence shows that NTMs disproportionately affect smaller firms, leading to market exit and concentration. Poorly designed NTMs can harm productivity and welfare, while coordinated, capacity-aware use can deliver inclusive outcomes. Policy design, transparency, and diagnostics must evolve to reflect the growing role—and risks—of NTMs in a fragmented global trade landscape.Publication Monitoring Global Aid Flows: A Novel Approach Using Large Language Models(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-04)Effective monitoring of development aid is the foundation for assessing the alignment of flows with their intended development objectives. Existing reporting systems, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Creditor Reporting System, provide standardized classification of aid activities but have limitations when it comes to capturing new areas like climate change, digitalization, and other cross-cutting themes. This paper proposes a bottom-up, unsupervised machine learning framework that leverages textual descriptions of aid projects to generate highly granular activity clusters. Using the 2021 Creditor Reporting System data set of nearly 400,000 records, the model produces 841 clusters, which are then grouped into 80 subsectors. These clusters reveal 36 emerging aid areas not tracked in the current Creditor Reporting System taxonomy, allow unpacking of “multi-sectoral” and “sector not specified” classifications, and enable estimation of flows to new themes, including World Bank Global Challenge Programs, International Development Association–20 Special Themes, and Cross-Cutting Issues. Validation against both Creditor Reporting System benchmarks and International Development Association commitment data demonstrates robustness. This approach illustrates how machine learning and the new advances in large language models can enhance the monitoring of global aid flows and inform future improvements in aid classification and reporting. It offers a useful tool that can support more responsive and evidence-based decision-making, helping to better align resources with evolving development priorities.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication The State of Global Services Trade Policies: Evidence from Recent Data(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-10-28)The economic environment for services trade has changed dramatically over the past 15 years, driven by rapid technological progress that has expanded the possibilities for exchanging services. How has trade policy responded to these changes? How do policy stances in a wide range of service sectors compare across economies? With its unprecedented global coverage, the Services Trade Policy Database and the associated Services Trade Restrictions Index, developed jointly by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, help address these questions. This paper makes three principal contributions. First, it offers an in-depth discussion of the current state of services trade policies and their differences across 134 economies and 34 services subsectors. Second, the paper reveals how recent (2016–22) changes in policy stances have seen progressive liberalization by lower-income economies but stabilization or even slight policy reversals in high-income economies. This dynamic differs fundamentally from the trend that unfolded after the Great Recession over 2008–16. Third, the paper shows the implications of policy changes over the past six years on services trade costs, and it showcases how the Services Trade Policy Database’s regulatory information can inform trade negotiations, regulatory analysis, and policy making. Alongside these contributions, the paper documents updates to the Services Trade Policy Database’s economy and sector coverage and explains the latest methodological improvements made to the World Bank–World Trade Organization Services Trade Restrictions Index.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Ride the Wild Surf : An Investigation of the Drivers of Surges in Capital Inflows(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01)Over the past 15 years, gross inflows to industrial and developing countries have enjoyed a wild ride. After reaching record highs in the run-up to the global financial crisis, they collapsed dramatically in 2008-09. As signs of global recovery reappeared, capital inflows resumed although at different speeds. The recovery in flows was faster and sharper in developing countries. This paper aims at understanding the (domestic and external) drivers of these surges in gross inflows using quarterly data for 67 countries from 1975 to 2010. It finds that domestic and external factors have significant explanatory power in driving surges of inflows. This finding holds for the sample of industrial countries whereas domestic factors play a significantly larger role in explaining surges to developing countries. Zooming into the findings shows that: (a) financial booms tend to attract massive capital inflows, (b) surges to either industrial or developing countries are driven by regional contagion, and (c) strong growth and natural resource abundance are keys to attract inflows of foreign capital into developing countries.Publication Indonesia Economic Quarterly, July 2014 : Hard Choices(Washington, DC, 2014-07)The Indonesia Economic Quarterly (IEQ) has two main objectives. First, it reports on the key developments over the past three months in Indonesia's economy, and places these in a longer term and global context. Based on these developments, and on policy changes over the period, the IEQ regularly updates the outlook for Indonesia's economy and social welfare. Second, the IEQ provides a more in-depth examination of selected economic and policy issues, and analysis of Indonesia s medium-term development challenges. It is intended for a wide audience, including policymakers, business leaders, financial market participants, and the community of analysts and professionals engaged in Indonesia's evolving economy. As Indonesians await the results of a presidential election on July 9, 2014 and plan for the upcoming inauguration of a new president in October, they face hard policy choices. The past decade of solid growth has contributed to considerable development progress. Indonesia now has the world's tenth largest economy in purchasing power parity-adjusted terms; however, there remains a clear risk that the recent moderation in economic growth could intensify. Against a backdrop of weakening revenue growth and rising energy subsidy spending, this would further constrain development expenditures in critical areas such as infrastructure, social protection and health. The new government will face an evolving global environment, which is expected to pick up speed later this year. The price of Indonesia's top six exports, accounting for 50 percent of total export revenues, continues to soften, falling by 8.6 percent in 2014 through June, led by coal (down 15.2 percent). The recent volatility of oil prices, due in part to the turmoil in Iraq, highlights the ongoing vulnerability of Indonesia's fiscal position to higher international oil prices. Real GDP growth in Indonesia moderated to 5.2 percent year-on-year and 4.3 percent quarter-on-quarter at a seasonally-adjusted annualized rate in the first quarter of 2014. Safeguarding hard-fought poverty reduction and social protection progress in Indonesia also calls for enhancing the management of disaster risks. This edition of the IEQ examines one such disaster risk: forest and land fires.Publication The Potential Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on World Trade(2009-11-01)This paper models the global financial crisis as a combination of shocks to global housing markets and sharp increases in risk premia of firms, households and international investors in a global economic model. The model has six sectors of production and trade in 15 major economies and regions. The paper shows that the shocks observed in financial markets can be used to generate the severe economic contraction in global trade and production experienced in 2009. In particular the distinction between the production and trade of durable and non durable goods plays a key role in explaining the much larger contraction in trade than GDP experienced by most economies. The paper explores the implications of the large increase in fiscal deficits and the implications of a global trade war in response to the financial crisis.Publication Post-HIPC growth dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa(2011-12-01)Access to debt relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative enhanced the growth performance across Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the subset of debt-ridden low-income countries. Over the past few years, these Completion Point countries have enjoyed significantly higher investments and growth rates, primarily fueled by the expanding fiscal space of the post-Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative era. They are also weathering the adverse effects of the global crisis much better than their non-Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative counterparts. Despite these growth rebounds, the region is not likely to meet the Millennium Development Goals, however. Long-term growth projections from a simple macroeconomic model, which is applied to Ethiopia, suggest that prospects for reversing the widening income gaps with other regions of the developing world are limited. Under the baseline scenario, assuming current growth trends, the estimates show that it could take more than five decades for per capita real income to double in Ethiopia. However, even these gloomy prospects are likely to be undermined by the looming risk of another sovereign debt crisis. In effect, the experiments show that lowering interest rates on external debt would not bridge the widening income gap with other regions of the world, unless it is accompanied by a rapid expansion of capital accumulation financed by sustained inflows of foreign aid.Publication Measures of Investor and Consumer Confidence and Policy Actions in the Current Crisis(2009-07-01)The current financial crisis has highlighted the danger that declines in confidence can have a self-fulfilling effect on economic activity. In this paper, the authors consider ways of measuring investor and consumer confidence, and try to explain the evolution of confidence using measures of financial volatility, investment performance, macroeconomic outcomes, and policy actions. They identify a link between investor and consumer confidence. Finally, they show that liquidity provision and easing of interest rates had only a limited effect on financial market spreads during the crisis, arguing for additional measures to address the loss of confidence. The paper focuses on the need for financial regulatory reform, and shows how the incentives to cooperate in this area are stimulated by a common shock to confidence.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication World Development Report 2011(World Bank, 2011)The 2011 World development report looks across disciplines and experiences drawn from around the world to offer some ideas and practical recommendations on how to move beyond conflict and fragility and secure development. The key messages are important for all countries-low, middle, and high income-as well as for regional and global institutions: first, institutional legitimacy is the key to stability. When state institutions do not adequately protect citizens, guard against corruption, or provide access to justice; when markets do not provide job opportunities; or when communities have lost social cohesion-the likelihood of violent conflict increases. Second, investing in citizen security, justice, and jobs is essential to reducing violence. But there are major structural gaps in our collective capabilities to support these areas. Third, confronting this challenge effectively means that institutions need to change. International agencies and partners from other countries must adapt procedures so they can respond with agility and speed, a longer-term perspective, and greater staying power. Fourth, need to adopt a layered approach. Some problems can be addressed at the country level, but others need to be addressed at a regional level, such as developing markets that integrate insecure areas and pooling resources for building capacity Fifth, in adopting these approaches, need to be aware that the global landscape is changing. Regional institutions and middle income countries are playing a larger role. This means should pay more attention to south-south and south-north exchanges, and to the recent transition experiences of middle income countries.Publication Doing Business 2014 : Understanding Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises(Washington, DC: World Bank Group, 2013-10-28)Eleventh in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 185 economies, Doing Business 2014 measures regulations affecting 11 areas of everyday business activity: Starting a business, Dealing with construction permits, Getting electricity, Registering property, Getting credit, Protecting investors, Paying taxes, Trading across borders, Enforcing contracts, Closing a business, Employing workers. The report updates all indicators as of June 1, 2013, ranks economies on their overall “ease of doing business”, and analyzes reforms to business regulation – identifying which economies are strengthening their business environment the most. The Doing Business reports illustrate how reforms in business regulations are being used to analyze economic outcomes for domestic entrepreneurs and for the wider economy. Doing Business is a flagship product by the World Bank and IFC that garners worldwide attention on regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. More than 60 economies use the Doing Business indicators to shape reform agendas and monitor improvements on the ground. In addition, the Doing Business data has generated over 870 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals since its inception.Publication World Development Report 2006(Washington, DC, 2005)This year’s Word Development Report (WDR), the twenty-eighth, looks at the role of equity in the development process. It defines equity in terms of two basic principles. The first is equal opportunities: that a person’s chances in life should be determined by his or her talents and efforts, rather than by pre-determined circumstances such as race, gender, social or family background. The second principle is the avoidance of extreme deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels. This principle thus includes the objective of poverty reduction. The report’s main message is that, in the long run, the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of economic prosperity are complementary. In addition to detailed chapters exploring these and related issues, the Report contains selected data from the World Development Indicators 2005‹an appendix of economic and social data for over 200 countries. This Report offers practical insights for policymakers, executives, scholars, and all those with an interest in economic development.