Doctoral Dissertation in Quantitative Economics
University of Kiel, in Partnership with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy
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Africa is a continent of great economic potential. With a population of 1.5 billion at a median age of 19 today, projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, vast natural and mineral resources, yet a share of only ~3% in global GDP and trade, Africa's economic transformation must materialize to provide opportunities for its youth and to foster a more balanced, equitable, and secure world order in the face of shared global challenges. The African Union's Agenda 2063 sets an ambitious path to achieve this, and with the formal enactment of a continental free trade area, a substantial landmark has been passed. However, trade and regional value chains (RVCs) must pick up significantly to generate the desired economic transformation, supported by industrialization and increases in productivity. For this, macroeconomic and financial stability are needed alongside industrial/RVC policies and large-scale investments in infrastructure and human capital. This doctoral dissertation contributes to our understanding of these critical ingredients. It documents the continent's progress in macroeconomic stability and investigates its drivers. It also dissects Africa's integration into global and regional value chains, eliciting progress, benefits, potentials, and challenges towards/of regional economic integration. Last but not least, it zooms in on the continent's infrastructure, utilizing geospatial big data and modern structural and empirical methods to provide evidence on local and global investment potentials at unprecedented spatial detail and scale. By combining rigorous quantitative economics and (causal) machine learning with the richest data on global production, trade, infrastructure, and economic geography available at the time of writing, it produces very detailed and substantive evidence on critical aspects of Africa's present and future economic transformation. It thus enhances our academic understanding of the continent, its economic potential and challenges, but also informs policies to accelerate economic progress and transformation at scale.
Africa, economic transformation and development, infrastructure, roads, spatially optimal investments, regional integration, trade, GVCs, RVCs, EAC, macoeconomic stability, growth, volatility, structural change, big data, partial and general equilibrium, causal ML, explainable AI
F14; F15; O11; O18; R42; R10; O10; O11; E30; E60