China and India and Ethiopia final report - FES Ethiopia

manufacturing and services sectors, and generating sustainable economic growthover the medium and long term. This will enable the country to help alleviatepoverty and create equitable social development. As a ‘developing’, buteconomically robust country, China has limited resources to invest abroad — areality that the Ethiopian government realises. Therefore, China is not necessarilyviewed as a panacea for Ethiopia’s economic and social development problems.However, China can serve as both an appealing economic model and a potentialcatalyst for socio-economic development through its focus on and investment ininfrastructure development.He emphasized the importance of taking note that China’s activities in Ethiopia,and in Africa in general, are part of its continuing emergence as a global power,and as such are no different from what major powers traditionally have done,although the rhetoric of a political discourse based on ‘solidarity’, noninterference,sovereignty and anti-imperialism adds a nuanced dimension totraditional great power strategies. Also, in its relations with Ethiopia (and othercountries in the continent), China is pursuing multiple objectives; and therefore itcan no longer be expected to subordinate its commercial and strategic interests, asWestern countries have done and continue to do. Nevertheless, it should be notedthat China’s and the international community’s lack of censure of the currentEthiopian regime’s stalling of the democratisation process, human rights violationsand closing up of the political space could have troubling long-term politicalimplications.Mwangi Wa Githinji (2007) showed the extent of competition that Chinese andIndian exports give Ethiopian exports to the world. And what has been thedirection of change .i.e., are exports of Ethiopia becoming more dissimilar orsimilar to those of china and India. Export similarity index measures used tocompare the degree of similarity between exports from two countries20