International trade and economic growth in Africa: The role of the digital economy

This paper examines the role the digital economy plays in international trade impacts on Africa’s economic growth based on 53 countries’ sample from 2000–2018. We further divided the sample into five sub-regions, and the results are estimated by POLS, random and fixed effects, and the GMM models. The findings showed that (1) trade only has positive effects on economic growth when interacted with the digital economy in the POLS estimations, (2) Trade has a significantly positive impact on economic prosperity without and with the interactive term in the RE, FE, and the sys-GMM estimations, (3) the output elasticities of capital and labor have positive and negative impacts on economic growth, respectively, (4) the regressions for the sub-sample yielded statistically significant differences in the output elasticities for the indicators. The study recommends that concentrated efforts be directed towards developing the digital economy to ensure international trade’s full economic effect in Africa.

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