Foreign Ownership and Performance in Sub-Saharan African Manufacturing and Services

This paper tests for differences in performance between foreign-owned and domestically owned firms in a sample of manufacturing and services firms from 19 sub-Saharan African countries. Results indicate that foreign-owned firms perform significantly better than domestically owned ones in sub-Saharan Africa across several performance measures, with the foreign-ownership premia usually being larger for services firms. The results further indicate that firms owned by a transnational corporation perform better than those owned by individual foreign entrepreneurs, although there is little evidence of differences in performance between joint ventures and wholly owned foreign enterprises. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.