Agricultural innovation, education, political regime, and institutional quality in Sub-Saharan Africa
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2020-08-21
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en
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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to show the assumed positive relationships between agricultural innovation, average education years, democracy, and institutional quality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Agricultural innovation is operationalized as cereal yield and agricultural output indexes weighted on the percentage of people working in agriculture. The panel dataset was made up of 34 SSA countries for the 2002-2017 timeframe. The econometric method employed was the fixed effects with Driscoll & Kraay standard errors. The results show that there is a positive effect between education and agricultural innovation. Thus, education improves agricultural workers’ openness to innovative practices. Democracy was found to be statistically insignificant. This implies that being a democratic country is not sufficient to increase agricultural innovation. The interaction term between education and democracy has a positive and significant effect on agricultural innovation. This means that democracy fosters education benefiting agricultural innovation. Unexpectedly, institutional quality has a negative effect on agricultural innovation. Likewise, the interaction term between education and institutional quality was found to be statistically significant with a negative effect on agricultural innovation. These last two results might imply that SSA countries might suffer from having low-quality institutions that do not support agricultural innovation.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen