Corruption and human capital convergence in Africa

Abstract

This paper studies the influence of corruption on human capital convergence in 46 African countries. Corruption is a phenomenon intricately woven in the fabric of many African countries’ important sectors. With a panel data analysis, this study seeks to find out how the corruption index of countries impacts conditional convergence of human capital. I cluster the countries based on their levels of corruption and perform a pooled OLS estimation to investigate the question at hand. The results show the presence of conditional convergence in human capital for the sample and indicate that income inequality and population growth rate both affect human capital convergence significantly.