Does Competition Spur Innovation in North Africa? Evidence from a Panel ARDL Approach

Walid Gani

Global Journal of Emerging Market Economies, 2024, vol. 16, issue 2, 212-230

Abstract: The launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area at the beginning of 2021 provides new opportunities for North African countries to boost their economies. To conquer this vast market, innovation has become an ineluctable need. Although competition policy may serve as a salient lever for enhancing innovation, it is still not well harnessed by North African economies, even though they have one of the oldest competition law regimes on the African continent. For this purpose, this article attempts to explore the relationship between competition and innovation in four North African countries from 1995 to 2019. The second generation of panel unit root and cointegration tests have been used in our study. Based on the estimations of the panel autoregressive distributed lag model, our findings show that competition positively impacts innovation in the long run. Furthermore, our empirical results demonstrate that innovation is positively affected by economic growth and financial development while negatively affected by human capital and trade openness in the long run. The causality analysis reveals a unidirectional causal relationship running from competition to innovation. JEL Classification C32, C33, K21, O30

Keywords: Competition; emerging markets; innovation; panel data; patent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09749101231209886 (text/html)

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:sae:emeeco:v:16:y:2024:i:2:p:212-230

DOI: 10.1177/09749101231209886

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Global Journal of Emerging Market Economies from Emerging Markets Forum
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().