Population Growth and GDP Per Capita Growth: Identifying the Causal Variable in 30 African Countries
Population Growth and GDP Per Capita Growth: Identifying the Causal Variable in 30 African Countries

Summary/Abstract: Within a wider framework of institutional factors of economic growth and the relationship between population growth and GDP growth, this article focuses on the population growth and GDP growth per capita for 30 countries in Africa between 1960 and 2020. We provide a comparative analysis of approaches to methodology and results obtained in the impact of population growth on GDP/pc growth discourse. By performing the Bootstrapped PanelGranger Causality test, the estimation results show that half of the countries showed no causality and other half of countries showed different levels of significant causality. The most seen causality is the unidirectional causality from GDP growth per capita to population growth. In addition, unidirectional causality is observed from population growth to GDP growth per capita and bidirectional causality. Overall, the results add more evidence into the research of endogenous population growth theory, which implies that there is country-specific environment which determines the causality between these two variables.

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