Impact of African leaders’ characteristics and regime transitions on economic growth in Africa: A dynamic model approach

Abstract

This paper examined the extent to which leaders’ characteristics and regime transitions impact on economic growth. A unique panel dataset, comprising 44 sub-Sahara African countries from 1970 to 2010, was used for the study. We used the differenced generalized methods of moments’ estimation to test our dynamic model for the dataset controlling for leader specific effects. We observed that democratic leaders were able to attract foreign direct investment and impact on economic growth positively. With regard to regime transitions, we observed that business cycle existed, and it reduced the rate of growth in democratic governance in election periods as compared to autocratic governance. Overall, our results show that there is a limit to which an ageing leader can stay in office. Moreover, the overall results point to a democratic governance having an advantage over an autocratic one in the process of promoting increased and sustainable growth and investments.

Keywords

• Leader characteristics
• Regime transitions
• Democratic leader
• Autocratic leader
• Economic growth
• Sub-Sahara Africa