What Is the Interaction Between Separation of Democratic Powers and Structural Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Fabrice Nzepang () and Saturnin Bertrand Nguenda Anya ()
Additional contact information
Fabrice Nzepang: Research Center on Innovation, Institutions and Inclusive Development
Saturnin Bertrand Nguenda Anya: Research Center on Innovation, Institutions and Inclusive Development

Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 2024, vol. 15, issue 2, No 105, 7702-7722

Abstract: Abstract The independence of the judiciary and the legislature from the executive can promote the reallocation of labor, innovation, and human capital and thus the improvement of structural change and intra-industry productivity, the two main components of structural transformation. At the same time, structural transformation can foster the emergence of strong institutions through improved incomes and living standards. The objective of this paper is to analyze the interaction between democratic separation of powers and structural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We use data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and the Africa Sector Database (ASD) and a vector autoregression (VAR) model on a panel of 18 SSA countries to illustrate our point. Our results show that the dependence of the legislative and judicial branches on the executive branch negatively affects structural change and intra-industry productivity. Moreover, judicial independence causes structural change, intra-industry productivity, and legislative independence at the same time, while legislative independence only causes structural change. On the other hand, structural change and intra-industry productivity are found not to cause judicial and legislative independence. These results suggest that judicial and legislative independence is likely to promote structural transformation, while improving the quality of democratic institutions is not directly related to economic performance in SSA. This study promotes the independence of these two branches of government by reducing educational inequalities.

Keywords: Separation of democratic powers; Intra-industry productivity; Structural change; Causality; Sub-Saharan Africa; Panel VAR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13132-023-01144-9 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:jknowl:v:15:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s13132-023-01144-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13132

DOI: 10.1007/s13132-023-01144-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Knowledge Economy is currently edited by Elias G. Carayannis

More articles in Journal of the Knowledge Economy from Springer, Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().