Infrastructure and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (original) (raw)

We examine the nexus between economic growth and infrastructure in a panel of forty countries in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period, 2000 – 2011. We use monthly data obtained from World Development Indicators and UNDP. We construct synthetic indexes of infrastructure stocks and infrastructure quality which we use with several control variables to estimate a System GMM. Our results show that infrastructure quality significantly explains economic growth while infrastructure stocks have no explanatory power. The results are robust to alternative panel compositions. African countries should therefore focus not on providing infrastructure bulk but improving the quality of their existing and envisaged infrastructure stocks.