China is also competing with many of the international lending agencies for the attention of many West African countries, where access to less complicated loans are becoming attractive. Regional economic units are looking to each other and to their central banks for balance of payments support rather than to international institutions.
In theory, it is fairly straightforward to define market power. In practice, however, it is difficult to pin down the level and evolution of market power empirically. There are two reasons for this. First, markups are not directly observable. Second, there is no one-to-one mapping between firms’ market power and point-in-time markup estimates.