Institutional Quality, Infrastructure and Economic Growth in Africa

We use a panel data set of 46 African countries over the 2003-2015 period to study the role of institutional quality in infrastructure-led growth. Based on causal analysis, we show large positive effects on growth for countries with strong institutional quality in comparison with their weak institutional quality counterparts. This result is not sensitive to the choice of a particular measure of infrastructure or of institutional quality. Our results could explain the presence of nonlinearities when estimating infrastructure-led growth and, at the same time, emphasize the importance of complementarities influencing such an estimation