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The primary contribution of this study is to investigate how institutional quality affects the relationship between the oil price changes and economic growth on net oil exporters in African countries split into net oil exporters and net oil importers. Whether oil price changes are good for the growth patterns of African economies lies on the interaction between oil prices and institutional quality. Oil price increases for oil exporting economies result in increased revenue which will be distributed to economic boosters of the economy however, the net effect of such revenues to the economies solely depends on how institutions distribute the oil rents to the various sectors of the economy. In contrast to the traditional direct effect of oil price changes to economic growth, this study shows that the impact of oil price on economic growth is non-monotonic in institutional quality. Oil exporting economies can benefit from oil price increase if they have good institutions. This has been assessed by including an interaction term, oil price-institutional quality, in the Panel Auto-Regressive (PARDL) using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) model. Such a methodological framework has an added advantage over other model as it allows for modelling of data with different orders of integration. The PMG estimator allows the intercepts, short-run coefficient, and the error variance to differ freely across groups while the long-run coefficients are the same. Using data from 1990 to 2016, it is revealed that the sign of the coefficient interaction is positive and significant as theoretically expected. Furthermore, the coefficient of the interaction term is greater than the coefficient of oil price as anticipated. This would mean that as long as institutional quality is good enough, oil price changes positively influence economic performance on oil exporting economies. As such, the findings of this thesis have important policy implications. Since implementation of quality institutions is an on-going process, the study results suggest that institutions should be strengthened towards economic activities rather than for political mileage.

There are few studies in Botswana which have examined the relationship between agriculture and economic growth. The uniqueness of this study is grounded in investigating disintegrated agriculture components into crop production and livestock production and investigating their nexus with economic growth. This study estimated the short and long term effects between crop production, livestock production and economic growth in Botswana for the period 1990 to 2017. The Auto-Regressive Distributed Lagged (ARDL) bounds testing approach was employed to investigate the stated relationship. Study findings from the ARDL bound testing approach confirm evidence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between crop production, livestock production and economic growth. Results indicated that livestock production has a positive and significant impact on economic growth both in the short run and long run. On the other hand crop production has a positive and significant impact on economic growth only in the long run. Efforts towards supporting agricultural sector growth should be emphasized to promote agricultural sector productivity in a bid to forge a move away from dependence on imports of food in Botswana. To enhance economic growth, in both the short run and long run, the government of Botswana and all relevant stakeholders should invest in and promote livestock production. In the long term, policies that foster crop production are essential for economic growth.