The African tragedy: the effect of democracy on economic growth

Saeed Khodaverdian ()
Additional contact information
Saeed Khodaverdian: University of Hamburg

Empirical Economics, 2022, vol. 62, issue 3, No 8, 1147-1175

Abstract: Abstract We estimate the effect of democracy on economic growth for the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in comparison with other countries. We find that in contrast to other countries, democracy in Africa benefits neither GDP per capita nor total GDP. We explain the former by changes in the size of the population and the latter by changes in the age structure of the population. Both demographic changes relate to the finding that unlike in other countries, democracy does not reduce child mortality in Africa. The evidence suggests that without improvements in health, democracy puts Africa on a path toward a Malthusian trap.

Keywords: Africa; Development; Population growth; Age structure; Child mortality; Demographic transition; Malthusian trap; D7; O10; I15; J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-021-02049-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:empeco:v:62:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s00181-021-02049-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-021-02049-9

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().