How does quality of institutions affect the impact of technology adoption on export performance in Africa?

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of technology adoption and quality of institutions on the export performance of African countries. Data on 49 African countries for the period 1995–2019 is used while the two-step system generalized method of moment estimation technique is employed for analyses. The results reveal that, in both the short run and long run, technology adoption and quality of institutions are crucial in driving export performance in Africa. More importantly, our results clearly show that, in both periods, quality of institutions serve as important channel through which technology adoption has its largest positive impact on export performance in Africa. Based on these outcomes, policies designed to improve the technology adoption and quality of institutions would be beneficial to the performance of exports in African countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology adoption
• quality of institutions
• export performance
• Africa

JEL Classifications:

• C23
• F10
• O30
• O55

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data employed for the study is available upon request.

Notes

1 The analysis was done for a sample of 54 African countries and compared with the performance of other continents of the world, that is, 44 from Europe, 48 from Asia, and 35 from the Americas, for the period 1990 to 2020d.

2 It must be noted that a maximum lag length of (2 3) was specified during the estimation stage.

3 The period and number of countries used are due to data availability.