Does Democracy Facilitate Economic Growth Or Does Economic Growth Facilitate Democracy? An Empirical Study Of Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the relationship between democracy and economic growth in 30 Sub-Saharan African countries. As the authors' proxy for democracy they first use the democracy index constructed by Freedom House and then check the sensitivity of their findings using, as an alternative proxy for democracy, the Legislative Index of Electoral Competitiveness (LIEC). They find support for the Lipset hypothesis - in the long run, real GDP Granger causes democracy and an increase in GDP results in an improvement in democracy - in Botswana and Niger with both datasets, for Chad with the Freedom House data only and for Cote d'Ivoire and Gabon with the LIEC data only.