 |
|
|||
Can Africa’s Young Drive Innovation?
Keywords
Quantitative Economics, Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Demographic Composition
Abstract
Innovation shocks are known to have strong and significant effect on growth particularly when such shocks are attributable to technology changes. Literacy rates in Africa appear to have significantly improved compared to those of the 1970s (World Bank literacy rate statistics 2013). There also appears to be significant use of high level technology in information access across Africa despite poor infrastructure and in many instances impediments to technology, use attributable to high cost of access to telecommunication infrastructure and devices. Growth for Africa has also been mostly attributable to exports in commodities and a gradual development of local markets. This study investigates the effect of Africa’s growing demographic composition on growth and innovation. Quantile regression technique is utilized in the analysis of the results, specifically the Qreg2 Wrapper by Parente and Silva (2013) allowing us to derive covariance matrix estimators that are valid when there is heteroskedasticity and intra-cluster correlation. Results show that Africa’s young and their innovative capacity have strong implications for growth.