In this blog, we hear about the efforts of Professor Kevin Ibeh, from the Department of Management, to encourage inclusivity in the post-pandemic landscape.
Photo by Ilyass SEDDOUG on Unsplash
Birkbeck Professor of International Business, Professor Kevin Ibeh, is among a select group of international business scholars recently invited by the official journal of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Transnational Corporations, to offer perspectives on the longer term implications – global, regional and sectoral – of the COVID-19 pandemic for international production and investment flows.
The Focused Section on COVID-19 published in September 2020 comprise insightful contributions from leading international business researchers and policy thinkers based in Denmark, Geneva, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The themes addressed include the balance between globalisation and regionalisation in the post-COVID-19 world; human rights issues, efficiency and resilience tensions and digital transformation of global value chains; and digital investments in Africa and a more inclusive post-pandemic world.
Professor Ibeh’s contribution focuses on the last mentioned theme and advances policies for promoting the intraregional and international investment prospects of African digital multinationals in the post-pandemic era. These policy ideas are organised around four main areas, organizational capabilities, funding access, digital infrastructure and regulatory environment, and they seek to promote a more globally inclusive investment landscape in which African-born digital multinationals would no longer be a rarity. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic’s amplification of humankind’s shared and digital future, Professor Ibeh calls on policymakers and influential stakeholders at all levels to intensify the push for a more inclusive global digital economy.
This work is part of Professor Ibeh’s influential and continuing research on African multinationals, which has attracted coverage in international media outlets such as The Economist and the Global Finance magazine.
