Nuclearity for partial crossed products by exact discrete groups

We study partial actions of exact discrete groups on C*-algebras. We show that the partial crossed product of a commutative C*-algebra by an exact discrete group is nuclear whenever the full and reduced partial crossed products coincide. This generalises a result by Matsumura in the context of global actions. In general, we prove that a partial action of an exact discrete group on a C*-algebra $A$ has Exel's approximation property if and only if the full and reduced partial crossed products associated to the diagonal partial action on $A\otimes_{\max} A^\mathrm{op}$ coincide. We apply our results to show that the reduced semigroup C*-algebra $\mathrm{C}^*_{\lambda}(P)$ of a submonoid of an exact discrete group is nuclear if the left regular representation on $\ell^2(P)$ is an isomorphism between the full and reduced C*-algebras. We also show that nuclearity is equivalent to the weak containment property in the case of C*-algebras associated to separated graphs.