Do multinational enterprises create local job opportunities in developing countries? We address this question in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa by combining information on domestic and foreign multinationals? affiliates over more than a decade with geolocalised individual-level data on labor supply. Having a multinational?s affiliate within walking distance correlates with an increase in employment of about +4% with respect to the sample mean. Multinationals? activity is correlated with higher off?farm and lower on?farm employment (+13% and -7%, respectively), a result driven by affiliates of foreign companies. Female employment and "good jobs" increase around affiliates, but only when they are part of foreign groups. A battery of robustness checks and a retrospective analysis exploiting time variation in the individual labor market entry deliver qualitatively similar results, suggesting our findings do not suffer major identification issues.

---

30 July 2024

---

Review of World Economics 2024

---

DOI: 10.1007/s10290-024-00547-3

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10290-024-00547-3

This Journal article is published under the centre's Trade programme.