Effects of Political Institutions on Economic Growth in CEMAC Member Countries

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the effects that political institutions can have on economic growth in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) zone after asking the question of what are the effects of political institutions on economic growth in the CEMAC zone? In this work, we support the hypothesis that the quality of political institutions is not neutral in the performance recorded by CEMAC countries in terms of economic growth. This analysis is based on World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI) data covering the period from 2002 to 2019 and concerns all member countries of the CEMAC zone, except Gabon. The choice of research period and countries was dictated by data availability. To do this, an empirical analysis that highlights the link by the PSTR model which is based on two stages was adopted. This is the verification of the existence or not of a nonlinear relationship and the detection of the number of regimes of the model. It remains from the results obtained that the variables relating to political institutions have a marginal effect on economic growth in the CEMAC countries, because the coefficients associated with these variables are not significant at the 10% threshold. These results suggest that institutional factors (rule of law, political stability and absence of violence and control of corruption) appear as neutral factors in economic growth. These results can be explained by the fact that the quality of governance despite reforms in CEMAC member countries is still weak to support economic growth. These results confirm those obtained by Sievers (2001) who gave a rather mixed assessment of institutions in African countries.