Economic Performance and Competitiveness Indicators: The Case of African Economies

Abstract

This paper presents a statistical analysis of the relationship between economic performance and competitiveness indicators to address the question of the extent to which competitiveness indicators provideuseful information when assessing economic performance. The analysis was performed on various examples of African economies. The possible relationships between economic performance and competitiveness indicators were examined by extending a basic relationship between economic performance per capita and investment by competitiveness indicators. The models were estimated by means of an Arellano-Bond estimator. The authors detected many statistically significant relationships between economic performance and competitiveness indicators in the cases of both the whole sample and specifically middle-income economies. However, in the case of low-income economies there are no discernible relationships between economic performance and the information included in the competitiveness indicators. The paper contributes to the analysis of the economic performance of African economies, for which the empirical evaluation of possible links between economic performance and competitiveness indicators is altogether missing.