The more a country is open to trade, the more it attracts investors and the faster its economy develops. However, some study showed that sometime it can be the opposite of all this. In this context, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between trade openness, capital formation and economic growth in African countries. To do so, we collected data of GDP per capita, trade (% of GDP), Gross national expenditure and capital formation variables. The method applied is panel cointegration and causality by using time series of 38 African countries for the period of 1990-2014. According to the results there is long run relationship between all the variables and the cross sectional co-integration test result indicates that there is more cointegration in Comoros, Equatorial Guinea, Niger and Guinea-Bissau. With highest GDP per capita, Equatorial Guinea has more long-run relationship between trade openness, capital formation and economic growth. However, one of the poorest countries in the world (Niger), has also efficient long run relationship between the variables. The panel causality test results suggest that there is unidirectional causal relationship from trade openness to economic growth. There is also bidirectional causality link between capital formation and economic growth. In the same context, causal link exists from capital formation to trade openness. The study suggests that African countries must increase the investment promotions in order to increase the capital formation and trade openness then to boost economic growth.

The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between natural resources revenue, fiscal policy and economic growth for 35 selected Sub-Saharan African countries. The panel data covering the periods of 1986-2014 was analyzed by using the fixed/random effect model estimation and the panel causality test. We also performed the panel unit root test in order to insure that our variables are stationary. The empirical results indicate that there is insignificant negative effect of natural resources revenue and bad fiscal policy on the economic growth. However, there is significant positive effect of capital formation on economic growth. We also found a bidirectional causality relationship between Natural resources rents and economic growth. There is also unidirectional causality link from government final consumption expenditure to Natural resources revenue and from Natural resources revenue to capital formation. These empirical results mean that Sub-Saharan African countries apply bad fiscal policy to improve the natural resource sector which does not efficiently contribute to the economic growth. This study suggests that countries of Sub-Saharan Africa must apply improved fiscal policy in order to add tax revenue to their total revenue; and they must also use the natural resources revenue in order to invest in other sectors such as education, manufacturing and agriculture.

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