 Welcome, everyone. My name is Chris Alden. I'm here to chair this panel today on looking at research on Chinese firms in Africa, insights, and lessons from field work. And I think that's what's very important about the work we're going to hear about today, is that we have with us a panel of experts who've done field work. They've not just reflected upon, but they've gone out there and done the evidence-based research that is always necessary to confirm, challenge, reaffirm perspectives or develop new perspectives on topics. And that's the case here. I'm not going to say too much about it because I think the point is to hear the speakers and hear how they've seen this. We have three speakers and a discussant. In order of presentation, Barry Soutman, who's a professor at Hong Kong Science and Technology University, he was not part of this project as such, but he's been involved for a long time in this particular field and has done a great deal of work on the role of firms, the perspectives and insights of the debates around the Chinese role in labor and African labor in that as well. For that, he is going to be speaking. We'll be followed by Carlos Oya, who's a reader in political economy of development and is, in fact, the project leader or principal investigator on this particular project and is based, of course, at SOAS University of London. He's going to look at, again, in a more general way about the field work, the challenges of methodology and access, and how this impacts upon our understanding of the China-Africa question when it comes to labor firms, et cetera. And then our last speaker will be Xiaoyang Tang, who's a researcher, research scholar and deputy director of the Carnegie Sinhua Center of Global Policy in Beijing. He's a project researcher and has brought in, is examining this topic from the perspective, the Chinese perspective and the field work he's done over the years in topics in the same venue and topics related to it. Then finally, we have a discussant, Linda Calabrese, who's a senior research officer here at the ODI and is going to unpick, unpack in a good way on the comments and presentations we have here. A couple of things before we leap in. This is being recorded, so you'll be able to reflect and review it and, in fact, tweet it forward and all of those things. The hashtag is on the top there. We have 20 minutes per presentation. I'm going to be strict about it. This is both a warning, a friendly warning to my people here at the table. And, yeah, let us begin. Barry. Before I begin talking about the topic that you see up there, localization of Chinese investments in Africa, I've been asked to say a few words about basically how we did this research. That is particularly how we were able to do interviews in connection with this topic. So I just want to spend two minutes about that saying some of the places or some of the sources from which we were able to gather information through interviews. Altogether, we did about 500 interviews in Africa, about half with Chinese and about half with Africans from about a dozen different countries. I'll mention these places or sources to which we went very quickly. First of all, the commercial and economic sections of Chinese embassies in various African countries. And normally people don't associate that with getting any decent information. But surprisingly enough, we've been able to go to these outposts of the Ministry of Commerce in various African countries. And they have helped to facilitate access to Chinese companies. Also, Chinese chambers of commerce are increasingly found in African countries. And they're often quite willing to talk about the endeavors of Chinese companies. Then the associations that exist among ethnic Chinese in African countries, among Huachao and Huaran, that is people of Chinese descent, mostly from China, of course, who have set up businesses in Africa. And they also have been very helpful. The headquarters of companies from China in Africa that exist within China itself. That is, of course, there are many subsidiaries of Chinese based companies that operate in Africa. If you go to their headquarters, you get on good terms with them first. They can help to facilitate interviews with their subsidiaries. Then Chinese friends who have relatives who have worked in Africa. This is actually a really good source of getting good interviews. If you have some friends and they are from a professional background, or their families are, they will almost inevitably now have somebody within their family or close friends who have worked in Africa. So we've gotten some good interviews that way as well. Chinese media in Africa, naturally, they go around and interview people all the time, so they have lots of different contacts. The kind of questions they ask are very different from the kind of questions we ask, of course. But what we're interested in is them helping us to gain entree, and they sometimes do that. Now, in terms of the African side, African government development agencies are pretty much always willing to talk. Although the quality of the information they get sometimes is lacking, because they don't have enough personnel, and often they have difficulty prying out information from the companies that are there. African government sectoral ministries, like, for example, ministries of agriculture or ministries of industry, et cetera, can also be helpful sources for interviews, although in some African countries it's rather difficult because you have to go through the permanent secretaries, get their permission first in order to gain access to the companies. Then trade unions, which have been one of our best sources of information because we're particularly interested in employment relations. So we've done surveys through the help of trade unions. African intellectuals, especially people who are political analysts, we see the same ones over and over again. They update us on their opinions and provide valuable information. Africans who studied in China, there are quite a number, of course, who've returned to their home countries, are working for Chinese companies. They have their old boy networks or old boy and old girl networks, and often provide interesting information as well. And then, of course, there are the people we survey. We've done various surveys among both Chinese and Africans. And the people who we survey, we try to interview at least a portion of them. So those are some of the sources of information that we have been able to tap into. Finally, I just want to say one thing about reliability of data because I'm going to talk about some data now. We do interviews. There are articles in the mass media, African media, Chinese media, world media. And then there are various local sources, some of which I've already mentioned. You can try to triangulate that information. If you're dealing with a subject like the one I'm about to talk to, then the information almost naturally is mostly in the hands of companies themselves. And those companies themselves, if they're a listed company, will have filings on stock exchanges in which they have to reveal some information. Of course, we do onsite observation. And we access also some non-government, non-Chinese sources, foreigners in Africa, for example, who can provide somewhat different perspectives. So that's all I have to say about that because that's all the time I have. I'll now switch to talking about the main topic here, localization. The most widespread persistent myth of China and Africa has been the claim that Chinese enterprises in Africa do not hire Africans. And some top U.S. leaders have talked about that. Some big U.S. journalists have talked about it. You can read the quote there. There have been several studies, though, done about the localization of workforces in Chinese enterprises in Africa. Excuse me. Most Western media have articles that are about China and Africa. And they repeat the claim that Chinese don't hire Africans. But there is some substantial evidence to the contrary. I'll just mention a few studies that have been done in recent years. A study by some Dutch scholars of firms in Uganda showing about a 90% rate of localization in the workforces of those companies. A study in 2014 in Kenya of 75 Chinese enterprises, which again shows about a 90% rate of localization in the workforces with regard to manufacturing and construction and a somewhat lower rate in the service sector. And then the very large-scale study done this year by McKinsey and Company, a business consulting firm in the United States, and 1,000 Chinese enterprises in eight African countries where the average rate of localization went from 60% in Angola to a high of 96% in Nigeria with an overall rate of 89%, but of course a much lower rate among managers. Well, the media often attributes this supposed Chinese non-localization of workforces and a non-adaptation to local laws or customs to various traits that they associate with Chinese, but there's really no evidence that Chinese are more venal, ignorant or ethnocentric than anyone else. And to assume so, we always argue, reflects probably some sort of racial or political bias on the part of the people who make these assertions. Indeed, some counter-evidence exists with regard to the question of ethnocentricity. A study that was done in the United States and China among students found that American students were much more ethnocentric than their Chinese counterparts. Now, there also is our own project on localization of Chinese enterprises in Africa, kindly funded by the Hong Kong government. We have used thousands of documents and actually more than 500 interviews now in 12 countries, particularly in our field site, main field site country of Zambia, to build a database on Africans within Chinese enterprise workforces. So we've gathered descriptive statistics for more than 800 enterprises, construction projects, industries and countries in Africa. So it's not quite as large as the one I just mentioned for McKinsey and Company, but it encompasses more than 45 African countries. Well, our findings have been that while Chinese investment in Africa... Oops, forgot to click. Our findings have been that while Chinese investment in Africa mostly dates from the 21st century, workforce localization has been there from the outset and it's become more advanced as time goes on. Almost all Chinese enterprises and projects in Africa, regardless of their size, have a majority African workforce. There's quite a bit of variation from country to country and from sector to sector, but the overall average is in the mid-80s, which puts us in line with the other studies which I mentioned earlier. Most Chinese managers in Africa who we've interviewed have strongly said that they want to deepen localization as circumstances permit, especially contingent on the availability of skilled local personnel. Outside of Africa, Chinese enterprises in most countries are in fact highly localized, so there are some exceptional places like Central Asia and the Caribbean. And there's no convincing evidence that we can find that Chinese enterprises in Africa are significantly less localized than our other foreign enterprises. But that's something which we can't completely determine because surprisingly enough, it's actually easier to get statistics in this regard from Chinese companies or about Chinese companies than it is to get them from non-Chinese foreign investors in Africa, except perhaps in the oil industry. Well, the differences between non-Chinese and Chinese investors on localization, we would argue, are much more structural than they are ideational. Western firms have certainly been in Africa longer than Chinese firms. This longer tenure means that there has been more continuous access on the part of Western firms investing in Africa to skilled labor. Of course, Western firms have the advantage of having their managers speaking the various colonial languages, and they share other cultural elements as well with Africans, which Chinese don't necessarily do. And they are seen by many Africans as being white companies, and thus they are assumed to be competent, to be high paying, to be ethical, et cetera. This, after all, is the discourse in the world. And of course, there are even more financial incentives for Western companies to localize, particularly their management, than there are for Chinese companies, because they pay higher salaries to their expats than Chinese companies do. Chinese firms' activities require using more locals than other firms' activities as well. Chinese are more involved in construction and manufacturing in Africa than Western investors, but they have to contend with an acute shortage of engineers, technicians, and skilled workers. Actually, there's a worldwide shortage of engineers and certain categories of skilled workers. Tanzania, for example, I'll show you the figures here. Tanzania has a very low ratio of engineers to population, even more so with Kenya and Zimbabwe, and you can see the comparisons with Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. Chinese also do more tightly scheduled government projects than other foreign firms do in Africa. Some of these projects are highly sensitive politically. Often they have to be completed before election time in African countries, so to build railways, build roads, et cetera, then it becomes imperative that they be finished on time. That means that Chinese companies often have to hurriedly bring in large numbers of skilled workers to complete projects on time. Many Chinese enterprises are also low profits. The much higher profits that Western enterprises have allow them to pay higher salaries than Chinese companies can provide, and thus they attract, that is the Western companies or other non-Chinese companies, tend to attract more skilled labor than the Chinese companies do on that account alone. Chinese SOEs are also, Chinese state-owned enterprises, are more likely than Western and other investors to consider political factors when they are making decisions about how to carry out their work in Africa. An example of this is the Sambu 3-nose policy that the Chinese state-owned enterprise, CNMC, carried out in Zambia during the global financial crisis. For political reasons they said that they would not lay off anybody despite the fact that all the other foreign-owned copper mining companies were laying off people. They would scale back their investments and they would halt any plans for new investments. So in addition, more recently Chinese firms have kept many Chinese employees at oil mining and other worksites in South Sudan even during the ongoing civil war. They kept people on site during the Ebola crisis in West Africa. And Chinese firms did not significantly scale back their activities during the recent economic downturn in Ghana. So our empirical conclusion is, oh, five minutes more. Well, our empirical conclusion is that Chinese firms' localization is in some respects worse than that of other investors in Africa. It's worse in the sense that there are generally fewer local managers than there are at other foreign investors, fewer local engineers, for the reasons that I've just talked about. Also, it's the same in most aspects. If you make a comparison between Chinese firms and other foreign investors, that is, there is the same high overall proportion of locals in non-Chinese and Chinese firms. But it's also better in some ways than is the case with some non-Chinese firms investing in Africa. And what's better tends to be what's political. That is, the Chinese firms do have to take into account political considerations. This is true not only of the state-owned enterprises, but also to some extent of private enterprises. We typically dichotomize the two and think, well, state-owned enterprises are the enterprises at the orders of the Chinese government. And of course, that's true to some extent, but even that's not completely true, because state-owned enterprises in China often will proceed on their own, ignore what the government is telling them. There, of course, are enterprises at all different levels from China, from the central government, from provincial governments, from municipal governments, et cetera. Private enterprises, surprisingly enough, although they don't have to obey orders from the Chinese government, often will take into consideration the policies and plans of the Chinese government. They often, for reasons of, for very sound reasons, economically try to have good relations with the Chinese government. And therefore, they too will often try to adopt policies close to those which the Chinese government is trying to promote. This is, of course, by no means an everyday occurrence, but at times when it seems to be particularly politically useful to do so, even private enterprises will take this stance. And that, of course, contrasts with the attitudes of Western investors. They are certainly not going to be ordered around by their home governments. In fact, they generally have more influence on the home governments than the home governments have on them. So this is, I think, the one area in which it could be argued that with regard to localization and perhaps with some other areas, Chinese companies may do better than other foreign investors. Well, I've actually have a few minutes left over, but I will gift those to the other people on the panel. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. I'm going to present now, before I present, I would like to show my appreciation to ODI and the DFID ESRC Growth Research Program for hosting us and giving very generous support to organize this event. And following on Barry's very important presentation, I'm probably going to skip the first couple of slides, which pretty much talk about what Barry has told us. Basically, when we started this project, the background was one where you could see all sorts of claims and counterclaims, especially on issues of localization, but not only also on issues of whether work conditions were particularly exploitative in Chinese firms compared to other firms, debates about work ethic clashes and the differences between perspectives between African workers and Chinese employers. And interestingly, coming from a research background in labor issues in Africa, very often mystified by some of these claims and debates, which seem to be completely oblivious of the realities of labor markets in the countries that people were talking about. So counterclaims, again, research like what Barry and other people have done, and different types of empirically grounded research which has shown a much more diverse picture. Perhaps the good news is that the field has been evolving in the last 10, 15 years, so it is now easier in a sense to debunk some of the most problematic myths, and this is the right time to get into more interesting questions. And that is pretty much the background to our research project. So for those of you who are expecting to see lots of findings and so on, I'm sorry I'm going to disappoint you because this project is right now halfway. We have just completed the bulk of data collection, but of course we need to process and analyze the data from the survey. So I'm going to give you, basically my focus is going to be on the research process and some of the difficulties that arise for anyone, any researcher willing to do research on these issues. And I think I'll try to illustrate why also this kind of research is so scarce. It's because of the challenges that it entails. And before that let me just give you a sense of the research questions that guided our project. Of course we asked questions around issues of localization and the quantity of jobs, so to speak. I think one point that relates to what Barry has just presented is one thing is talking about localization in terms of percentages of the workforce that are local in Chinese firms or the foreign firms. And also in our case we looked at national domestic firms in two countries, in Ethiopia and in Angola. But it's also about the actual, the absolute creation of jobs. And it is true, particularly in the case of Ethiopia, there is enough secondary evidence which suggests that when you look at foreign direct investment, and especially in the sectors of construction and manufacturing, Chinese firms account for a very, very large proportion of all the jobs that have been created in the last 10, 15 years there. So in terms of actual job creation, there's no doubt that there has been quite substantial creation of jobs of different kinds. And of course the bulk of jobs that have been created are unskilled, semi-skilled jobs, not the sort of jobs that Barry was referring to when talking about managers and management level and engineers for obvious reasons. So we were trying to basically, our research was organized around creating a sufficiently rigorous comparative framework that would allow us to compare like with like as far as possible to see whether conditions were better, worse, on what aspects of the labor relation. And also trying to link the evidence that we collect on conditions through large-scale quantitative service to what we know from secondary evidence of labor relations in these sorts of sectors, specifically in China. A related question is precisely to what extent and why Chinese firms and for the matter also other non-Chinese firms export in labor regimes and practices. And when we think about labor regimes and practices, we must think about them in terms of their sectorial specificity. There are particular labor regimes that are common in certain manufacturing sectors, other labor regimes that are more common in some forms of construction and so on. So from that secondary evidence, we will be able to see whether indeed there is a process of exporting or trying to bring a model of labor relations or whether companies actually have no option but to adapt and engage in a flexible adaptation according to the context. So our hypothesis indeed is that there is actually a lot of adaptation, although of course companies come from their own background and they use to certain labor regimes and it is expected for them to try to implement these regimes in different contexts. Now for us I think the most useful or interesting questions are not so much whether our conditions will be worse, better or average or the same is whatever differences we find, what really explains these differences and that's where there is a huge range of factors that can explain labor market outcomes. Anyone with a bit of experience in this field will know that. So we will try to see to what extent for example sector specificities determine the type of labor relations that affect different types of companies from different origins. Equally the types of jobs within those sectors will provide another source of variation. Of course even within the sector, within the same group of companies, you take Chinese companies you are likely to find some variation in it from our qualitative research we could already sense variation in terms of corporate practices and how to deal with different contexts and different constraints. Not only in terms of different contexts across countries but also different contexts within the same country. And in this respect our experience of research in Angola was particularly interesting because we started the research at a critical conjuncture where the crisis was hitting after the collapse of the oil prices that had a knock-on effect on various economic activities especially in the construction sector and that affected also labor relations across all Chinese and non-Chinese companies in this sector. So that also gives us another source of variation that may be of interest. So in terms of methodology let me just give you the flavor of what we did and how and in what sequence. For this kind of research obviously you start with a process of literature reviews and database search. Surprisingly actually we did find quite a lot of evidence, secondly evidence not just Barry's work but also the work of other people in this field so there's actually much more evidence than we thought on labor relations in Chinese firms in Africa and generally more towards the counter claims that I mentioned before. So we've got all that background and we engage then in fairly extensive qualitative scoping research which took many, many months, 8, 9, 10 months depending on the context essentially to prepare the grounds and the conditions for large-scale end-sample surveys. We did, we chose two countries Angola and Ethiopia which are particularly relevant probably two of the best possible case studies to understand and explore these issues probably because in quantitative terms these are two big players in the China-Africa field. They are always on the top three or four of recipients of FDI, of constructed overseas project from Chinese companies and so on. And also these are two countries that provide a fairly interesting contrast. They're extremely different as a policy and historical context and therefore what you would expect is some significant differences in terms of how the same companies in the same sectors operate given the differences in policy framework and labor market dynamics and so on. So we completed very recently, a few weeks ago, the last few surveys and we managed to have almost 700 workers across Chinese, non-Chinese firms in construction and manufacturing in Angola and 840 in Ethiopia again with more for manufacturing and less from construction. This is the distribution of our samples, 40 companies in Ethiopia, 14 of them Chinese and you can see that the breakdown of workers of the sample by manufacturing and construction 539 and 300 in the case of Ethiopia. For Angola we had 36 companies, 17 of which Chinese and 682 workers distributed more or less 45-55% between construction and manufacturing. So pretty much reflecting the relative importance of these two sectors. In Angola the construction sector is indeed the main creator of jobs of these kinds of jobs whereas in Ethiopia the manufacturing sector has been growing very fast in the last five to six years. In terms of the characteristics of our sample, we only interviewed African workers so this is not a survey of Chinese workers. In terms of localization I mean I'll say something maybe afterwards but pretty much along the lines of what Barry has said quite substantial localization especially when you're looking at unskilled and semi-skilled labor. In order to, one important thing in this kind of exercise is making sure that your comparisons are sufficiently rigorous. I mean one problem with a lot of the claims that have been circulating is that people are comparing apples with bananas basically. So when we look at one sector we don't just do the whole manufacturing sector we do the full-ish. So for each of the two countries we selected key sectors where the presence of Chinese companies was significant but where the variation in terms of the parameters the criteria wasn't too significant. So in Ethiopia we worked on the textile and garment and the foodware sector very light industry, labor intensive industries whereas in Angola really what's been developing in the post-war period is the construction material sector with very strong linkages to the construction boom of the early 2000s. For construction again it's a very heterogeneous sector it would be nonsensical to have a mix of residential, real estate development and so on so we decided to go for road construction which was quite important in both countries and that again reduces a lot the amount of variation that you can expect because the contractors are supposed to be fairly similar but we can only accept in both countries only the highest graded contractors could be eligible for such projects so in a sense that reduce the scope of the relevant firms to be compared. So in a sense the outcome of all this is that what we're comparing is Chinese firms operating in these sectors in this particular segment to the top. So we're sort of using the top benchmarks those firms and those sub sectors where we're going to expect the best working conditions so whatever we find that would be the comparator won't be the average which is an important thing to bear in mind. So let me say something about the main challenges that you face when doing this kind of research. Obviously the biggest, the single most important challenge is the topic. Nobody wants to talk about labor issues, particularly companies but to say that, I think Barry also made a similar comment Chinese, we didn't find Chinese firms particularly more resistant than other firms in fact if you were to ask me, give me your top five of the most difficult firms in terms of doing this survey probably would find maybe one Chinese company in the top five and the top five would include a British company so no clear difference between the two groups. All firms are reluctant to talk about labor issues I mean they're not reluctant to talk about labor issues if you interview managers they're reluctant to allow teams of enumerators enter the premises and interview their workers following rigorous sampling methods to stratify random samples so that's the kind of thing they don't like for all sorts of reasons they want to pick their workers but also they don't want you to disrupt the production process especially if you're working in factories so some of these reasons are fairly understandable. Now the sectors themselves were also sensitive both road infrastructure and factories are quite important for the government because of the strategic importance of these projects and therefore allowing foreign researchers even with local partners going into these companies required a huge amount of bargaining and negotiation at essentially government level. Countries themselves if you open Angola as I say from the point of view of a research question is probably the most relevant countries from the point of view of easygoing research probably one of the most difficult in the continent especially Angola where there's very little research culture very little used to surveys especially quantitative surveys so that was a big source of constraint for us sensitive of firms already mentioned that Chinese state on enterprises which dominate in Angola definitely in Ethiopia the construction of roads are particularly difficult to access everyone knows that and you need to follow and find the right channels in order to make sure that you get permission. In order to build the sampling frames to get the right lists of companies etc that was also a major problem particularly Angola where secondary data especially in employment are simply non-existent or those that are published are not reliable so that required quite a lot of time for triangulation and cross-checking and going quite in depth into the existing list of companies for different sectors and trying to have the same information from at least two different sources. I've already mentioned the question of validity of the sectors and the problematics of Angola during the crisis in 2015 and 16 and of course the logistical challenges normal to the visits to remote construction sites. So basically every single company of the list that I've mentioned there was a struggle in order to be able to implement the survey so how did we manage? So it was a mixture like in the case of Bari a mixture of channels tools and weaponry if you want. We were very careful in terms of the introduction to the project very mind the various sensitivities of the different actors but we did adapt in a sense the blurb about the project to the different respondents whether there were company managers government officials depending on what departments so everyone in the team had to know what to say to whom. We did work, I mean that was one of the key goals to work to get buy-in essentially from local governments. What became clear after a few months of scoping was that if we got the laissez-passez to use that expression from government especially from key departments from the Ethiopian and Angolan government basically we had 90% of the job done. Particularly in the construction sector even if the companies do not want to entertain your surveys if the road authority asked them to do so they will have to do it because they are the clients. So once we understood that basically we managed to secure the support from these institutions which wasn't just in the form of simple letters it was also more active support on the part of some key participants in this sort of key allies within these departments. We also work with very able local institutional partners especially the university in Angola which allows us to also open lots of doors. Very strong field teams I'll show a picture of one of them later on with multiple roles including some locally hired Chinese assistants experienced in the country also with the right contacts. We worked a lot through informal networks of connections with firms exactly the same as Barry was telling us before and snowballing from those connections so doing a lot of networking and particularly that was critical in the case of Angola. Angola took a long time to get the government by in. Before we got that we managed to already do quite a lot of qualitative scoping because of these informal connections and very frequent scoping research trips visits to companies, government institutions ensuring confidentiality anonymity that also took time to explain, believe it or not and a lot of patience. Also things very simple things like, you know, what's up incredibly important and useful for troubleshooting and helping teams on the ground when they faced resistance from local level site management because one thing is getting the okay from the headquarters of the company Luanda or in a different thing is sending a team to remote area construction site where the local chief or site manager might not be informed or might be playing games with our team. In that case then there was a lot of back and forth through WhatsApp and WeChat and many other social media. Five minutes, good. So that was, I'm going to now give you a flavor only of some of the emerging findings and some of the things that we expect but as I say, you know, this will come out probably at the end of next year when we will be able to say something based on the very large scale surveys that I've mentioned before but the qualitative research gave us a flavor of some of the things and Ciaro and Tang will also present some of them based on his own field work in Angola more recently. I will just select a number of points. One thing that become quite clear especially through the scoping research is national context that's matter, probably matters more than the supposed flag of the firms. So there are critical differences between Ethiopian and Angolan context but generally in terms of the political economy and the political settlements in these countries but also in terms of the specific sectors we were looking at. So of course even on the issue of localization I already mentioned that Angola is a basket case when it comes to localization is where you find the lowest proportion of workers whereas Ethiopia is actually much better and that has to do with several factors but one of them is certainly government policy and specifically for example the strict regulations governing the issuing of visas in Ethiopia for certain occupations which pretty much constraints companies in terms of what they do. So sector and job differences do matter a lot clearly the scope for learning and security varies hugely between manufacturing and construction in the sense these two sectors are a very good platform to explore the extent to which sector matters but also when we look at manufacturing we'll see quite substantial differences between even foodware and textile and garment or textile and garment factories depending on the labor intensity and the skill intensity of some of these jobs. Company management also seems to matter it was quite striking to find quite interesting variation among Chinese firms just based on interviews with company managers but also similarities between Chinese and non-Chinese firms in terms of how they make sense of the labor processes and conditions and how they explain the way the labor practices. Particularly when you look at factories, manufacturing sector so it is quite hard to establish a clear pattern of exported labor regimes or practices that can clearly differentiate Chinese firms from other foreign or domestic firms. There are some commonalities that some patterns that seem to emerge particularly in the case of Angola which we will be exploring with the data from the large scale surveys but while proportional workers seem a steady increase in Angola they seem less able to mobilize domestic workforces. That seems to be a function of the experience of each company in the country how many years have been operating in the country issues about communication barriers and also the nature of the actual project whether it is EPC or subcontracting or what that tends to have an impact on the basic issue of localization and of course what Barry already mentioned which is the political experience of some of these projects and the constraints the way for example the Angolan government treats and uses Chinese contractors very differently from the other contractors I mean not least because 90% of Angolan contractors are all owned by a very small group of the elite around the Dos Santos regime so these are essentially different segments of the construction sector and therefore that needs to be borne in mind. Now what seems to be interesting is that Chinese firms do something that other firms don't seem to do which is trying to establish migrant labor regimes with an associated dormitory labor regimes that is in the case of Angola not so much in the case of Ethiopia and that has to do with the difficulties that some of these firms have faced in areas like around the Wanda in terms of mobilizing workers and in terms of workers retention. So as a result of these because they're basically tapping into different workforces we're going to have different segments of the workforce for different sets of companies. So for example for many Chinese construction firms in road building we're likely to find many more workers of rural origin who are poorer, younger and less educated and that's because of the places where they come from compared to many of the other contractors who are operating basically based on labor forces who are based in Wanda or other bigger cities so that will have an impact in terms of understanding the differences let me just finish with a couple of pictures that is the classic picture of one of the most publicized companies in Ethiopia, Huajan where you have the stereotypical case of the labor-intensive industry where the localization is very, very high and that contrasts with the kind of jobs the kind of work that we'll see in the final this is our team in Angola and that's the kind of interviewing that we were doing in the construction sites in Lansky Laborers or in this case machine operators and you can imagine the sorts of constraints that the teams had to face in terms of finding time to interview and being able to conduct the service in due time so I'll stop there, thank you Thank you Okay, over to you Xiaoyang So today I will mainly focus on the recent field trip in Angola's construction related sectors so I actually wrote my first paper on China Africa also on Angola's Chinese employment in Angola that was 2007 I did my first trip in Africa and it was in Angola and that time actually several issues about localization which we discussed and also the rumor about not hiring Angola and also was already there and in my paper I already showed the facts the numbers I got from the field trip the Chinese that time it was on average 75% Angolan workers and interestingly this kind of rumor they didn't go away with all the workers of the researchers and after 10 years they are still here but in my paper I also kind of through that time that time the Chinese investment was still very limited but I also already showed there are trends towards employing more and more Angolan workers when the companies they got familiar with the local situation because of their business logic you will focus on this they will they have to employ more local workers in order to save that cost and this trend proved to be true when I revisited the country 10 years later but before that I first just described the methodology so the trip was about 2 weeks in June and July 2017 and it's complimentary to the quantitative surveys Carlos just mentioned therefore I cannot give you all the results in this event because this will be disclosed with the survey together so during that 2 weeks I interviewed 24 projects including 15 construction firms and 9 construction material manufacturers and among them the SOEs and private firms they are mixed actually just here a note in Africa for to a large extent the SOEs and private firms their business logic are not so different they mainly target at getting profit and overseas then for them the political mission has less significance than within China and mainly the SOEs and private firms their difference is rather like sectors because the SOEs they tend to concentrate on the construction sector while the private firms they are usually in manufacturing and in service sector and SOEs also usually tend to be larger and private firms some of them are pretty small while just a few of them are large and then I talked to these firms most of them are the Chinese executives but also with several local employees so I can speak a little bit Portuguese so we also discussed in Portuguese and the accessibility it's not a big issue for me because when the Chinese usually I contact the Chinese executives and I said that I want to learn about how you train and manage your local employees they are pretty willing to talk about that issue some of them even said yes we need to talk to you on this thing because that's exactly what we are interested in what we that's where we want to work on so only I think there are one company which is a little bit murky in Angola because they have it's a company with it's a private company and then they got huge enormous amount of contract from Angola government and I actually even traveled with the boss of that company on the same plane so he refused to talk to me we know in Angola there are some things not very clear but to a large extent companies they are friendly to talk to me during my trip and here are some just very brief general findings so first regarding the number and composition of workers so the large difference so Carlos will have more detailed comparison between countries but for me through the interview I see the difference is rather sector based then because in housing construction sector we actually see very rapid trend of using increasing of Angolan workers one company one largest like housing constructors Chinese constructors in Angola they used to have broad at the very beginning their ratio Chinese and Angolan workers at the very beginning of their entry was almost one to one but then after five years in the second phase of their construction contract they just have 800 Chinese then versus 5000 Angolans so it's a very dramatic change but in some other sectors when more skilled workers are required then the ratio is much lower for example in road construction where people just need the technicians to operate vehicles then even today the ratio is still about 100 100 to 100 100 Chinese to 120 Angolans such a ratio and in manufacturing sectors there is also intra sector difference in sophisticated factories like cement factory it's 60% of the workers are Angolans and 40% are Chinese and the same is for steel mill but in some factories like brick factories the ratio can be as high as 50 Angolans to one Chinese so in about 200 workers, 200 people factory only three Chinese managers because they just need to do very simple machine operation or do some very manual labor while the Chinese just need to focus on general management and like machine maintenance that's machine reparation that's duty for Chinese and then for the administration section Angolan employees usually have a smaller portion that's obvious for the reason of language and communication and Angolan labor law has a quota of 70% it requires companies to hire 70% labor so it doesn't include management but only focus on labor but the problem is this rule is never strictly implemented so in 2007 there was already this rule but even today there is this rule but it was never implemented this one reason is because the Angolan government knows if to implement that rule you may increase the cost of construction projects and factories and the increasing cost actually in the end it's actually need to be paid by the Angolan government itself so they have this general consideration and because this is never strictly implemented they also cannot just demand Chinese to do that because this will create and fail competition conditions and then for the reason of using Chinese or using Angolan workers from the interviews mainly there are several reasons for Chinese workers it's obvious as Barry also mentioned so the Chinese workers are more efficient they are more skilled so they can meet the deadline of projects and they also have a better understanding of technical details and quality requirements because Angolan workers it's difficult to find skilled workers because of the education system was damaged during the long year of civil war and then better communication is also obvious then the preference for Angolan workers there are several interesting points unique for Angola first is the recent like increasing use of Angolan workers it's caused by the actually exchange rate and the exchange control of the country so when Angola still was enjoying the high oil price actually Angolan government they also do not really worry about having so they give a very high price contracts and Chinese they just ask Chinese companies to keep the deadline but now when the oil price plumper dropped then the contract price is lower and also it's more difficult for the Chinese to get Angolan control the exchange and then the Chinese have to use the Angolan workers so this is also just a very purely business logic and another thing interesting is actually the Chinese companies they reported to have more serious labor disputes with Chinese workers rather than with Angolan because the Chinese workers they have when you have tens of thousands Chinese workers coming to Angola then the management of these people overseas including their visas their dorms and their salary payment especially if the exchange rate is fluctuating then that's much more complicated than you just paying local people with local currency so in fact management with Chinese workers is more difficult and then there's also political and social concerns that's mainly for the SOEs but that is more emphasized people reported that the Chinese embassy and also the Angolan government emphasized that more recently for the last two years that's perhaps also a result of the Angolan financial difficulty but then another uniqueness in Angola for this localization process is the security and high turnover of this country because in Angola in comparison to Ethiopia the country actually has less tradition of industry of non-farming jobs and then a lot of workers they are coming from rural area and also because in Angola mainly it's construction companies therefore they rather have this temporary employment so therefore the turnover is very high and also in Angola then the security is notorious actually when I was there during just one week I heard about five kidnapping and robbery and these people are just near me like when I interviewed one company one manager of a company and then suddenly he got picked up a phone and said his employees kidnapped and he had to go there with dollars to pay the ransom this is really a very important case and then in the employment management it's important so actually the Chinese companies they pay more attention to the workers' loyalty and also their security background rather than their skills and that's also related to the point that they bring in migrant workers like Carlos noted they would rather hire workers outside from the village and put them in a compound that's some way similar practice like in China there were also millions of migrant workers but here there is for some reason they are similar because migrant workers within a compound is easier to discipline and to manage but also for some security reasons which are unique there then they offer dorms and also another thing is Angola they have some skilled local workers but they are very expensive and they tend to stay in government so that's the contextual issue and then also another contextual issue is even when Chinese in some contract they need to train maintenance and operation stuff and they did that but this stuff then they because they are so few the number is so small and then Angolan government tend to like use them in other promote them or they may go to other companies then this actually often Chinese founder it's difficult to really transfer that project to local government because of lack of maintenance stuff and then subcontracting management in Angola subcontracting management just here briefly then there is also a rule of subcontracting 30% of the contract amount to local companies this rule was not strictly implemented and was emphasized also recently for the same reason as that local employee rule and yeah so it's the low contract price and the experience with local subcontractors are mixed and some companies report the local contract have no technical capacity and some may even further subcontract to North Koreans or other countries but some also report the local companies they are better at labor management than Chinese so this just shows there is also a big gap between the local companies and the Chinese now increasingly uses the local companies also because the local companies they accept current so they do not always require US therefore the local companies now have this advantage and then the Chinese they are very conscious now when they subcontract to local companies they will do very careful contract management to share risks between contractors and government because this 30% rule if it is implemented then the Chinese company should say if there is some delays then you should not just blame me that's actually something we should do together yeah because it's not only the commercial thing but also for the country development and yeah the strength of local firms then I already mentioned the firms they labor management and machine operation they are fine but just a week at some machine repairing and also delicate decoration so some details matters here the world it's quality management in details that's the strength of Chinese company and that's also why Chinese they still keep them technicians to do a lot of decoration work and repairing and this will take perhaps longer this is actually not a matter of education or training it's rather very long year experience Chinese said they themselves need like 7, 8, 10 years to really learn these details okay that's my presentation and I also have a question for Cheyenne later about subcontractors from North Korea you can explain a little bit later thank you very much it was really fascinating for me to listen to all these presentations as someone who works a lot on the manufacturing sector in Africa and specifically in East Africa I think hearing this level of detail about employment dynamics and employment practices it's really extremely interesting I'd like to raise three main points about what we've heard so far the first one is really to take a step back and to look at the broader sort of manufacturing industrialization agenda as we know countries in Africa and specifically the region that I'm focusing on in East Africa are really trying to jumpstart their industrialization process and China is in this sense as we've heard a very important player in this agenda there are others who have been involved in this manufacturing industrialization sector in East Africa so for example countries like Uganda or Kenya have a long history of Asian conglomerates that work in a lot of sectors ranging from agriculture to services to manufacturing as well but they've not managed to achieve the sort of scale that's necessary to kickstart this industrialization process or to strengthen the industrialization process and Chinese firms are starting or are managing to do that actually and this is in a way that Western firms are actually not doing so there's no investment from Western or from OECD firms in manufacturing in East Africa and this is not by coincidence this is because Western firms normally have a very different way of operating, very different technology they use to a very different investment climate in larger environment and they find it very difficult to cope with the conditions that are present in African countries and Chinese firms seem to have a much better way to dealing with that just to give you an example of a sort of story that you might have heard already Rwanda is a relatively small country with only 10 million people and if you look at Rwandan firms, the largest ones count 500 600 employees and there's a handful of them and in the last couple of years a Chinese firm invested in Rwanda and they opened a garment factory and these garment factories export into the US and they export into South Africa they're actually producing police uniforms that they export to China and this factory already employs last time I checked they employed 1,000 people so much larger than other firms that are present in Rwanda huge source of employment, huge source of exports as well so this is really interesting and this is something that like working in this sector this is something to be definitely be thinking about the second point I'd like to raise is around employment dynamics we have heard that Chinese firms tend to employ a large number of workers from the host country I think while there has been a lot of discussion around this, I think this should actually not be surprising, firms look at costs so they want to keep their costs down and they want to minimize their wage bills and hiring very expensive foreign expatriates is not the way to do it and on top of that you often have to work with very complex very difficult work permits in different regimes so when you're trying to set up a firm and you're already fighting with registering your business or getting your license or setting up your power and infrastructure and so on on top of that you also have to work to obtain work permits so this is something that firms definitely try to minimize and this has emerged from all the presentations I think so Carlos has mentioned about the skills workers but we've also talked about sort of higher skills workers and I think this is very interesting in a way to distinguish in the sort of higher skills not only between low skills and high skills but also within the higher skills to look at the sort of technical skills and managerial skills so these are skill sets that are necessary to firms and and these might be different and the requirements for this might be different we have talked already about the difference between sectors so different sectors might have different requirements in terms of the technical skills they need the managerial skills they need and so on and so forth so just to give you an example of this we have been working on the garment sector in Myanmar as well so this is a project we have here at ODI we've worked with Xiaoyang there so during my last trip to Myanmar I met with a garment factory they're producing for a large UK retailer so the the firm is Hong Kong they have their headquarters in Hong Kong they have a couple of factories in Mainland China and then they decided that Myanmar is going to be the next destination for garment production so they're going to invest there so they have set up a factory in Myanmar which is working quite well and they've brought with them some expatriate workers for their higher skills positions for doing the quality control machinery, managerial skills and so on and their expat workers are actually from Madagascar and from Mauritius so they're actually African and the lesson there is that countries that have had a long history of developing specific sectors can actually develop the skills that are necessary and can export their skills when this is required and this brings me to the last point that I wanted to raise which is around the sort of the time, the age so the age of firms of course and the age of the sector is very important and I think what we have been discussing today is a sort of snapshot of the situation right now I think if we go back in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years and look at the same firms or the same sectors in these countries we might find that in the cases where the sector has managed to grow and to develop they've also managed to build their skills and build the skillset of domestic workers and domestic workers are actually going to be more likely to occupy the sort of higher skill positions so yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting ideas to be developed in these discussions but I'm going to stop here thank you, thank you very much wonderful, we've heard a lot from our panellists here this is an opportunity for all of you to chip in, please if you have a question identify yourself I think I'll start with you and sorry could we wait for the mic because this is a recorded event and it won't be picked up on the recording otherwise Hello, my name is Kate Byrd from ODI I'm currently contributing to a report for the chronic poverty advisory network C-PAN on pro-porous growth and I'm very interested to hear more, if any of you have any more, on the degree to which the poorest people are engaged in the work services in the companies that you've researched and if they are if you can say anything about the quality of the work that's being provided in terms of the sort of decent work agenda I'd be very interested to put together a case study on that for the report let's take three questions and then yeah, there Hi, hello, my name is Abdul Rashid Issa I'm from Sowas C Development Economics I think my own will be based on the conceptual meaning of localization I think when we focus our attention on the number of African workers I don't think we are looking at it in the best way of course when you have a construction company you need more workers like low level workers like driver stand managers so why don't we look at it like the percentage of payroll that goes to African workers if we are really if we really want to look at how do African workers benefit from Chinese firms or something more tangible numbers I think is not going to give an accurate picture of localization we'll do three I'll come back to you Arti Krishnan from ODI we've got a sense about employment characteristics but I was wondering about the actual labor conditions like do you see changes in social benefits for instance and I mean were they all casualized labor I mean assuming these construction projects are long and they have gestation periods was there say learning by doing and then did these labor were they able to move up in anyway and also I mean a short other question is there any such design like is so this data is obviously not is it representative of the specific firms that you're looking at especially when you want to do a counterfactual analysis and if you've done any form of weighing did you weigh your give sampling weights to your data for instance depending on the importance of certain characteristics and so on good let's go to the final so perhaps we can ask let's go from here well maybe I won't address all three of the questions because if we all each address all three of them it's going to be difficult so why don't I address your question because it was most directly about how we should measure localization and I think your point is well taken that if you just look at the solution in terms of the workforce between locals and expats then you only get a very small part of what localization is about and it's true that you could measure it in terms of the percentage of the total payroll that goes to either locals or people coming from the outside but you would have to take into account of course the skewing of who is employed from the outside because naturally and despite the talk in the media there are practically no unskilled Chinese or even semi-skilled Chinese who come to work in Africa that is pretty much everybody who is brought by a Chinese company to work in Africa is somebody with a high level of skills for example among people employed by Chinese owned mines in Africa mining is one of the areas where I've done a fair amount of research virtually all of the Chinese who come to work there in mines in Africa are going to be engineers or highly skilled workers who have had very substantial experience in mines in China or elsewhere in the world so if you try to figure out the success or non-success of localization based upon looking at percentages of the payroll it does tell you something that's useful but you have to take into account the fact that you are in effect comparing a largely unskilled or semi-skilled local workforce the rather small number generally of Chinese who are almost all highly skilled and many of whom are professionals so I fully agree that there are many other dimensions to localization besides the one that I talked about and that my fellow panelists talked about there for example many interesting cultural dimensions with regard to localization but I think the first thing that comes to everybody's mind is whether or not Chinese companies hire local people and that is because so much of what we think about in terms of the whole discourse about China and Africa has been shaped by the media and as was noted by several panelists they continue to shape it in a way that is at odds with the empirical reality Ok, first question on degree to which poorest people are engaged again I'll say at the beginning of the presentation we will disappoint you because we have not analyzed the data yet but the questioners in our sample service of workers included sufficient questions to at least build the socio-economic status variable which would allow us to see how relatively poor the workers that we sampled are relatively to the national context and also in terms of comparisons across sectors and firms the sort of hunch that I gave at the beginning in my presentation was that my expectation would be because of the type of labor arrangements of some Chinese contractors, this is just for the construction companies in Angola, not in Ethiopia that one would expect to see probably a larger proportion of very poor workers in those companies compared to Angolan and other foreign contractors much quite a big difference actually because of the minimum skills that they require from their own and skilled workers and semi-skilled workers and where they are hiring locally from remote provinces of Angola as opposed to Luanda that will obviously show up in these differences whether these are the poorest of the poor within the country probably unlikely but some of them are likely to be probably within the bottom quintile of the national income distribution but I would expect quite a bit of variation now on the question of localization I think Barry has already said something but let me just provoke you a little bit and say well I mean I don't think the payroll would be a very good measure actually so if you just take the example of Angola that's why the issue of comparison is important I can certainly tell you that Angolan companies have a similar number of expats in those higher level positions so you go to well-known Angolan company high level contractor and pretty much 90% actually more than that of the management and the engineers are from where? Brazil Portugal so what is interesting is if I were to do the exercise that you propose you would likely see a much bigger proportion of payroll in Chinese companies going to the Angolan and semi-skilled workers for the very simple reason that the expat managers and engineers working in the other foreign companies earn 3, 4, 5 times as much as the Chinese managers and engineers in the Chinese companies so that is particular to the Angolan context I'm talking about that is a finding of interest it is a finding of interest we've seen machine operators in well-known actually Angolan companies with Angolan Portuguese companies earning 5, 6,000 euros a month for one of the top level most sophisticated machines just because the company could only trust that person of course why would they do that these companies are getting unbelievably fat contracts from the government anyway so they can afford to do that which is why the Angolan government is basically treating different segments of contractors differently according to where they come from what links they have with the regime etc so it's actually complicated to say it I do think that the numbers are important because the number of jobs per se is one element of course poorer and skilled workers receive low salaries compared to the managers but the impact that that has on the families and the spillover effects of those wages the wage labour linkages that exist for those people cannot be discounted if there's one something that is important about these non-agricultural jobs it's precisely that they are part of the process of labour market formation and that is indeed an important aspect of the whole process so that's why the quantity the numbers of jobs do I think do matter a lot on your questions Artie I can't say much about labour conditions because we haven't analysed the data by definition most of the jobs in this sector are casual so when people say well no permanent jobs are created for me it's actually quite silly especially in infrastructure the very infrastructure construction the proportion of the workforces that are actually permanent workers are extremely small because of the nature of the sector themselves so the question is for example one interesting policy question is in the context of crisis which would be interesting to look at in the context of Angola in particular which firms are more likely to sack workers including casual and also permanent workers in the context of slow down projects being stopped etc and I think there are some possible differences between different kinds of companies the manufacturing sector is creating different types of jobs much less casualization at least from what we can observe in the Ethiopian context and we can't really say much about the wages but in the Ethiopian context something that is a problem from the start is that there's no official minimum wage so a lot of the companies basically expecting the government to tell them what is really the minimum that we can start with as a base salary because these companies work with the base salary and then they top up with all sorts of performance variable components and I think the setting of that base salary is critical and if this is set too low and that's in a sense the government is also part of the part of the story and I want to have an impact on who are these workers in the context of manufacturing the sort of factors are emerging in Ethiopia 80-90% of that labor force is young women from rural areas and they don't have and some of them have very high expectations because another thing which is interesting and this is something we observe this is not sweat shop regime in the sense these are newly built high standard in terms of the infrastructure so the expectation that some of these women have is that actually the salaries should be higher than what they're getting but that's also partly because of what they see compared to what they had so it's again something we will be looking at in terms of the representativity as I said within each of the firms that we sample we followed strict sampling protocols of certified random sample so all the samples will be represented over the firms included when you don't have an adequate sampling frame conducting a random sampling is silly so what we had to do is basically go to the top who are the main employees in this sector and the top benchmark in terms of working conditions and comparing like with like as much as possible otherwise especially in a project like this this is not a national household service so you need to restrict the total sample and that is when the purpose of selection of the companies is fundamental but that follows empirically analytical criteria so in that sense I would say yes sample is certainly empirically analytically relevant the question of statistical representativity is not relevant in this particular case okay so as Ferry and Carlos already responded most of the question shortly respond to the localization question yes I think you are right to say the number itself cannot just conclude all the localization question actually there are different levels from the numbers from the positions and also then about like whether the ownership and the spin-offs of local companies these are all should all be evaluated and actually in our research project not only Carlos but also other research project in this program in this ESRC program we actually have we are evaluating different aspects of the Chinese impact on this local skill training and local technology acquisition and local entrepreneurship growth different aspects regarding the work condition then shortly answer is actually as we mentioned Chinese companies they hired migrant workers and they offer dorms and in fact these dorms they are considered as a benefit or welfare for by this local employees so they we according to my interview companies they give like every day five dollars or six dollars per person this ratio and so along this this is for meals and so actually in the companies they can eat much better than home and also their housing conditions in these dorms are much better than like their village and traditional house today because I could not send the pictures it's too large but if there was a chance or next time I can show you the pictures of how these dorms they actually are considered as some benefits okay another round of questions I think you would thanks for the presentations is that being picked up yeah okay a quick question on employment dynamics which I guess is to to the panel in general which is Chinese labour relations are distinguished by the absence of independent trade unions and I'm wondering how this plays out with employment dynamics with Chinese investments in Africa where you do in certain African countries where there are independent trade unions sorry I will get back to these people but I realize I've been sort of directed this way and I know there are a couple of people who have question on that side so perhaps you and you and then oh there's a mic over there great so I would like to say thank you to the panace that was really really interesting my name is Lotta Takala Greenish I'm senior electorate U.E. Bristol the question I want to ask was about the forms of employment so there's a bit of a mention about casual employment did your research uncover the use of informal seasonal labour brokers so when you said employers you interviewed employers that might say I work for this company and you work there year and so on and so forth and what were the implications if you like from your research Director Felder I'm here from the ODI I've got two types of interest here I'm part of the growth research program but I'm also heading up the supporting economic transformation program here at ODI and I've got two questions one is that it's really important I think to get much more data and evidence around the sort of the question that you put up at the start about localisation rates and so on to get deep analysis on that and you do that and I think that's really really great but maybe I could push you a bit more around the sector differences around localisation rates so about localisation rates I think we heard about the first presentation about 75 to 80 percent but there was also about a discussion that it's very sector specific and what I could imagine is that in the garment sector it's much more closer to the centre so and in the construction sector I think that Chao Zhang was mentioning 100 to 120 so maybe there it's more like 50 percent and if that's the case I think it would be quite interesting to see if there are really significant differences across sectors and by casual observation I would say that indeed in the roads sector the localisation rate is much lower and I was in Machacos for example two to three weeks ago to the north of Machacos there was lots of road building going on to the north as a project run not by the Chinese in the south to Machacos it was run by the Chinese the Chinese contractors and workers decided to leave the country because of the problems around the election just like many other international organisations and other staff actually left the country and those projects were stopped whereas to the north it wasn't run by the Chinese and those projects were still running so I suppose that tells me a bit of a story that I suppose localisation rates are a bit less for road building works but it would be interesting to sort of see whether that is significant but another question is around the link perhaps to management and the performance of management of companies and whether Chinese companies, Indian companies particularly Chinese companies in this case can get more out of the workers compared to other companies I don't know what you are looking to that but there is quite a big literature now going on around the importance of management for the performance of firms so is it indeed the case that Chinese firms are better managed than other firms is the productivity higher of these workers or is it actually the opposite of the case and that is sometimes what I hear particularly in Kenya is that motivation of workers in Chinese or Indian-owned firms is actually less and therefore the productivity of workers is also lower in Chinese and Indian-owned firms so it would be interesting to see whether you have something to say on that but I found it very interesting and I am really looking forward to following the project and the results Why don't we ask Xiaoying to start and we will go back this way yeah so maybe I just first regarding the union unionization in fact that's something that Chinese actually the employees the Chinese companies in these countries they already realize the importance also sometimes the danger of unionization yeah so actually to some extent if the law in some companies when the law regulates there should be unions then they actually have to conform to that but if possible then they try to avoid unionization especially some experienced companies in Ethiopia then they try to kind of avoid unions coming into their companies within the legal framework and this actually have very had more experience especially in Zambia because their union their strength is more powerful while in the two countries we investigated Ethiopia and Angola the union's power is rather weaker than in comparison to Zambia and then maybe I just for the seasonal employment maybe I leave it to you and then about the sector difference yeah as Dirk also pointed out there's a significant sector difference like in some part the shoe making garment and also simple brick factories you may have this 100 to 1 or 50 to 1 this ratio and so even when we say it's a one even let's say just a textile this so it's even within a category textile there may also be like the garment making and then weaving mills this also have a different ratios due to the different technical technical features but here I one thing is in generally speaking we would say this sectors with more labor intensive this labor intensive sectors they are more in Africa it's obvious that Africa's manufacturing first it's also often labor intensive and also when the Chinese they invest in Africa they tend to use a labor intensive approach for example there are ways to use automatic machines or to use this highly sophisticated vehicles but the Chinese think in Africa especially in Ethiopia the workers they are cheaper why don't we rather use the laborers then to save the cost on these machines so therefore they tend to use this labor intensive approaches so yes there are some sectors like the road construction you have to use these machines that's why they cannot be replaced by labor so that's why there is this high ratio of Chinese technicians but if possible then in most of the sectors the Chinese would choose this more labor intensive approach and about productivity I think here my opinion is it rather varies between companies not really between nationalities so even within Chinese companies some companies for example in this shoemaking in Ethiopia I can see for the last 5 years Huajian significantly their productivity improvement is better than other two Chinese companies yes yes on the question partly on the trade unions say something let me just say that overall yes trade unions are very weak in both Ethiopia and Angola particularly in Angola and I would even venture to say that calling a union independent in Angola is a bit of a stretch yes so yeah I think Ethiopia is a mix it really depends on the sectors the unions are actually quite active in some sectors the other interesting thing is that leads to quite interesting contrast in perceptions as Xiaoyong just said there seems to be a perception among Chinese managers that these countries are very unionized and unions are very important their perception seems to be that the unions are far more important than they actually are and I think that might be because of what they've been told and also their direct experiences because certainly when you look at some of these sectors and the national domestic firms they barely touched by trade unions but I think it's partly that trade unions sometimes are also quite selective in terms of where they operate and generally it's easy to see that foreign firms are a clear target and this is my hunch I think Chinese firms are a particular target for countries more than others but I wouldn't be able to really generalize on this we'll see, I mean we have questions on trade union membership in the service so we will be able to say something about differences on informality, seasonality and labor brokers so let me just go of labor brokers first that was a very interesting finding barely, it's very very hard to find instances of these sort of cascades of labor brokers and subcontracting many other parts of the world there's a lot of direct employment actually much more than we expected and particularly in Angola it's really hard to find the notion of labor agents as labor brokers only in some services sectors more than anything but not in these sectors in the construction sector of course as I say a lot of the work is rather than seasonal project related so it does have an end we do have questions and the question are about regulation from workers in terms of how long they're going to stay in the company and I think most of the time this is uncertain of course according to the labor law the regulations about after so many months you're supposed to be permanent but as I know from my work in the agricultural sector these labor laws can very easily manage just by sucking the workers and then re-employing them one week later everyone is doing that in agriculture and that makes it so seasonal but just an interesting fact about for example certain types of work I mentioned the rural based workers going to some factories even in Angola but also to construction sites but in the case of factories usually these jobs are not casual not least because the company is engaging on the job training they invest in some of the training and their priority is to retain especially some of the best workers not to get rid of them some companies seem to face typically Chinese because they bring many of these workers from rural areas is that the workers go back to the villages during the rainy season floor farming so they actually introduce their own seasonality into their job and for them it doesn't mean that they're dropping their jobs they're actually going back to the factory and interestingly a lot of them actually get their jobs back but that was a huge problem for some workers and the employees themselves did acknowledge that that was a practice that was quite common because they had to go back and that's also partly the reflex that this is a transition stage in terms of building an industrial non-agricultural workforce and still people basically with two feet in different sectors the differences across sectors yes very quite significant differences in terms of localization but also within the same sector I think Xiaoyang already mentioned so if you look at construction clearly those projects are more skill intensive like you need fine skills on decoration like even plastering for certain types of very high quality projects then the level of localization is much lower than for other projects in which this is not a major requirement also when depends a lot on the relative importance of deadlines for the project tends to have an impact on the localization within the same sector but on the productivity again from the qualitative research we've done if you look at the garment sector the standards tend to be quite common across factories but the different factories do differently in terms of the usual time seconds per operation and these ratios of efficiency what we got from these interviews was a sense that for shop floor workers, for production workers is actually relatively easy with given time so 2, 3, 4 years to reach efficiency levels that are comparable to Vietnam Vietnam was usually mentioned as one of the top in China of course in terms of these time efficiencies but it takes time and what was interesting about this is that they say that one of the major bottlenecks to reach these efficiency levels is not the actual production workers is the factory supervisors so those who supervise the production lines this is where they find that they're not sufficiently good at problem solving and troubleshooting when there is a bottleneck in a production line whereas the individual production workers they can be trained and in a matter of months they actually reach quite decent levels of productivity so of course there will be variations depending on those companies that are operating individual production networks for big buyers they tend to be the best in terms of reaching these efficiency levels in short time those who operate for the domestic market in building materials, industries etc is a completely different story the first question about the absence of unions as it happens I've done field work principally in Zambia and Zambia is a mining country and one of the principal areas of my research is to do with miners and those mining unions had a long history of sharp struggle against the employers and when Chinese companies came there they were uniformly hostile to unions and I think this applies not only to the mining sector but to many other sectors so that was when I first started out doing research every Chinese boss that I talked to was hostile to unions and in part this was because they had the idea that unions make outrageous wage demands and also that the unions wanted to enforce rules which were legal rules in various African countries which they thought would inhibit the process of production but what's interesting over time is that re-interviewed these Chinese bosses not only in the mining sector but in construction and other industries they have gradually come to accept the presence of unions which they're legally required to do of course in most cases but also because they think now that the unions being not political in nature or only political in the sense of supporting this or that party to be in government but not having goals beyond higher wages, better working conditions they actually think that now they can work with the unions to ensure industrial discipline to obviate strikes etc so they adopted basically the same position that many capitalist countries typically do adopt with regard to unions they want to tame the unions to make them apolitical and to ensure that they don't go beyond making wage demands and talking about working conditions which could be the subject of bargaining of course as was already noted unions in most sectors in Africa are relatively weak but even in these stronger sectors where unions with histories of militancy are present nevertheless the attitude of Chinese bosses now is it's better to join them than to try to beat them as for informal work maybe this is not quite the right term to use with respect to employment at Chinese companies in Africa what there is is still a lot of workforces that have no contract that is they are subject of an oral agreement or even nothing at all even though the law may require that a contract be provided to them so not only are they not permanent workers but they are workers without contracts and this is of course not something that occurs just at Chinese owned firms but at firms more generally in fact in the locally owned aspects of the economy it's even less common to find that workers have contracts let alone that they are hired permanently and of course in certain sectors it's obvious that people are only going to be employed from time to time I'm from a family of construction workers and I know very well that you work for a little while then you're unemployed then you work for a little while longer and this is the case of course in the localization sector in Africa as well with regard to differences in localization across sector something's already been said by my colleagues but I should add that there are a couple sectors where I think localization is necessarily lower than it is in other sectors one is IT there are two primary Chinese companies operating in Africa that's Huawei and Zhongxin ZTE and at these companies the rate of localization is necessarily significantly lower than in other sectors because the work is at a very high level of skill and it's simply difficult to find enough people who have been trained although the percentage of local people working at those two very big companies that are operating across Africa has been increasing over time but it's still difficult because even if people come to work there then they jump to some other local company South African company or to an indigenous company and difficult to retain people in that sector the other area where there is relatively low localization it has to do with very small traders and these are like mom and pop stores they mainly employ relatives from China of course this is true all over the world but they still have a significant number of local workers the average there's been surveys done about this the average for these mom and pop small scale traders from China is to employ six to eight local workers but then again they're going to have six to eight people who are working in the shop so the ratio then comes down to half and half or something of the sort then the question having to do a productivity, my colleagues have already answered that basically but I just want to add one thing about it the question that you raised about motivation of workers at Chinese firms compared I guess to motivation of workers at other local workers or local enterprises I don't think any really clear findings have been established in that regard yet but I will say that there are two factors which I think are important in terms of lower motivation among workers at Chinese firms if indeed there is lower motivation and one would be of course lower wages generally paid at Chinese firms and I've already talked in my presentation about some of the factors which mean that there will be lower wages although the gap between what other foreign-owned firms pay and what Chinese firms pay has been narrowed over time and so there isn't a huge difference anymore but there still is a difference and of course motivation is very closely tied to how much you're getting paid if you feel like you're getting paid less than you should be getting paid less than your brother who's working at the firm across the street then obviously your motivation is going to wane the other factor maybe it's even more important is that in certain African countries there is a political discourse about the Chinese and this political discourse is highly prejudiced but even beyond prejudice which is of course again common all over the world is that it's highly political that is to say in certain African countries particularly in southern Africa political parties that are in opposition will use the Chinese factor as a way to criticize the government and if they are doing that that means that a lot of people in the country are hearing certain things about the Chinese which may or may not be accurate and if they hear those things negative of course then they are going to have a negative feeling about their Chinese employers that they might not have if they were working for a different set of employers all that being said since I've interviewed workers who have worked for local firms I can tell you that their morale their enthusiasm is generally quite low because they get even lower wages and because the bosses feel they can treat them in any way they want to treat them because after all their co-nationals often their working conditions are worse than in Chinese firms and therefore you could expect that their work enthusiasm would be less unfortunately we've run out of time I know there are quite a number of questions I didn't even address the missing middle here so the good news however is that there is a reception I think next door is that right so it becomes an opportunity for you to talk to the individual speakers themselves thank you very much