Convergence in military expenditure and economic growth in Africa and its regional economic communities: evidence from a club clustering algorithm

Charles Saba (), Nicholas Ngepah and Christian Nsiah

Cogent Economics & Finance, 2020, vol. 8, issue 1, 1832344

Abstract: This study examines the convergence in military expenditure and economic growth for a panel of 35 African countries between 1990 and 2015. We employ the Phillips and Sul methodology to achieve our objective. Overall, the results at Africa level reveal no evidence of convergence in military expenditure and growth. However, after robustness tests, the final club classification results do support the hypothesis of club convergence for the two variables. The results of the analysis show that there exist: (i) two convergence clubs for military expenditure; and (ii) five convergence clubs for growth. The empirical findings further suggest that the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) form distinct convergent and divergent clubs, exhibiting considerable heterogeneity in the underlying defence and growth patterns. In addition, the empirics confirm that the countries in each region appear to have chosen dissimilar defence and growth transition paths. The policy implications are discussed in the concluding section of this study.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/23322039.2020.1832344 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:oaefxx:v:8:y:2020:i:1:p:1832344

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/OAEF20

DOI: 10.1080/23322039.2020.1832344

Access Statistics for this article

Cogent Economics & Finance is currently edited by Steve Cook, Caroline Elliott, David McMillan, Duncan Watson and Xibin Zhang

More articles in Cogent Economics & Finance from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().