Life Expectancy in West African Countries: Evidence of Convergence and Catching Up with the North

Olaoluwa Yaya, Oluwaseun A Oyekunrin and Ahamuefula Ogbonna

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We investigate the possibility of convergence and catching up of life expectancy values of West African countries with those of North African countries. Following the theory of time series convergence documented in Bernard and Durlauf (1996) and Greasley and Oxley (1997), we apply more robust unit root tests, based on Fourier nonlinearity and instantaneous breaks, proposed in Furuoka (2017) in investigating the convergence of each pair, that is, a West African country with that of a particular North Africa country. As no unit root in the differences of the pair implies convergence, the results obtained by the new statistical approach quite outperform those of classical unit root tests. The results show general evidence of convergence of life expectancy values of those in West Africa to those of the North.

Keywords: Africa; Convergence; Fourier function; Life expectancy ratio; Nonlinearity; Unit root (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C22 C5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/102873/1/MPRA_paper_102873.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Life expectancy in West African countries: Evidence of convergence and catching up with the north (2021)
Journal Article: Life expectancy in West African countries: Evidence of convergence and catching up with the north (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:102873

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().