Studies and researches
1/2024
Population Growth and GDP Per Capita Growth: Identifying the Causal Variable in 30 African Countries
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 Panel-Granger 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.
population growth, GDP growth per capita, Bootstrapped Panel-Granger Causality test, endogenous theory of population growth
J01, O40
J01, O40