The Africa-Dummy: Gone with the Millennium?

Abstract

A fixed effects regression estimator is introduced that can directly identify and estimate the Africa-Dummy in one regression step so that its correct standard errors as well as correlations to other coefficients can easily be estimated. We can estimate the Nickel bias and found it to be negligibly tiny. Semiparametric extensions check whether the Africa-Dummy is simply a result of misspecification of the functional form. In particular, we show that the returns to growth factors are different for Sub-Saharan African countries compared to the rest of the world. For example, returns to population growth are positive and beta-convergence is faster. When extending the model to identify the development of the Africa-Dummy over time we see that it has been changing dramatically over time and that the punishment for Sub-Saharan African countries has been decreasing incrementally to reach insignificance around the turn of the millennium. 1