Significant Drivers of Growth in Africa

We employ bootstrap techniques in a production frontier framework to provide statistical inference for each component in the decomposition of labor productivity growth, which has essentially been ignored in this literature. We show that only two of the four components have significantly contributed to growth in Africa. Although physical capital accumulation is the largest force, it is not statistically significant. Thus, ignoring statistical inference would falsely identify physical capital accumulation as a major driver of growth in Africa when it is not.