**1. Introduction**

Foreign investment and foreign trade remain interesting subject matters for most researchers, economists and governments owing to their prestigious impact on a country's aggregate economy and its sectors. With that being mentioned, notably less attention has been given to foreign direct divestment (FDD). FDD seems to be the most neglected area of research and it seems as if there is not much literature regarding this phenomenon. This study aims to address the FDD concept in selected Sub-Saharan African countries. Foreign direct divestment is a concept involving an adjustment in the ownership of a business that involves the partial or

full disposal of an asset or a business unit [1]. Also, when there is an increase in the general prices of goods, it is referred to as inflation and the opposite as deflation. The same concept also applies when there is an increase in investment inflows from foreign nationals to a domestic economy, it is referred to as FDI inflows for the host economy and the opposite is referred to as FDD. This implies that foreign direct divestment occurs when there is a decrease in foreign direct investment. Most researchers, policy makers and governments seem to be mostly concerned about the trends in FDI while totally neglecting putting measures that may reduce or sidestep FDD to have consistent and stable FDI inflows and outflows.

FDD can occur for either external or internal factors. García-Bolívar [1] suggests that weak business climate seemingly contributes to a decision to divest as much as there is no proven direct correlation. FDD might lead to numerous negative economic factors such as a decline in economic development, reduction in employment and might also cripple the facilitation in technology transfers. Among other reasons, this might be because most developing and Sub-Saharan African countries use FDI to fill the gap between domestic investment and savings due to their low levels income. According to literature, the determinants of foreign direct investment are the same for foreign direct divestment but with the opposite sign. However, no consensus seems to have been reached regarding the determinants of FDI according to past studies [2].

Boddewyn found that foreign direct divestment is the opposite of FDI. Before divestment, there must be investment and there are also several studies across the globe on foreign direct investment, such as studies by Kumari and Sharma [2]; Tahmad and Adow [3].

Most studies have already established that there is investment but tend to pay little or no attention to the concept of divestment. This paper therefore aims to fill research gaps in literature by attempting to find any occurrences of foreign direct divestment during the period 1998–2018. The limited availability of data restricted the study from including all developing and all Sub-Saharan African countries. The countries under investigation are Botswana, Egypt, India, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa. This study attempted to find variables that are most likely to cause foreign direct divestment. The chosen variables are real gross domestic product, trade openness, lending rates and urbanisation. The rest of the paper is therefore organised as follows, following the introductory section is Section 2 which presents the trends of FDI in the selected Sub-Saharan, developing and emerging countries. Section 3 presents the theoretical analysis of the macroeconomics of FDI and FDD. Section 4 gives a brief review of literature followed by Section 5 which discusses the methodology of the study. Section 6 focuses on the discussion of the empirical results and the last section concludes the study and provides recommendations.
