An Empirical Analysis of the Effect of Income Inequality on Economic Growth in West Africa

Nazifi Abdullahi Darma and Muhammad Ali

Journal of Empirical Economics, 2014, vol. 3, issue 4, 221-231

Abstract: The study empirically examined the effect of inequality on economic growth in West Africa covering the period 1980-2011, and using panel data from various secondary sources. The fixed effect and random effect, generalized method of moments (GMM), and granger causality models were applied in the study. The dependent variable is real per capita GDP while the independent variables are Gini-coefficient, poverty, human capital and openness. The findings based on the adopted GMM model revealed that inequality and poverty have significantly negative effect on economic growth in West Africa while human capital and openness are positively related to economic growth in the region. The study therefore recommended among others, the need for reinvestment of the proceeds of growth into land reforms, poverty alleviation, human capital and infrastructural development.

Keywords: inequality; poverty and economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://rassweb.org/admin/pages/ResearchPapers/Paper%203_1497028129.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:rss:jnljee:v3i4p3

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Empirical Economics from Research Academy of Social Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Danish Khalil ().