Threshold effects of inflation on economic growth in selected African regional economic communities: Evidence from a dynamic panel threshold modeling

The objective of this study is to estimate inflation threshold and examine its impact on the inflation-growth nexus in selected African regional economic communities. While a number of empirical studies exist in this area for developing countries, they bundle up countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America which do not have the same inflation experiences. This study therefore focuses on Africa. However, since African regional groupings themselves have different inflation experiences, non-linearity in the relationship between inflation and growth is explored within each grouping separately. The study uses dynamic panel threshold modeling recently suggested by Kremer et al. (2013) which extends the non-dynamic panel threshold model of Hansen (1999) and the cross-sectional threshold model of Caner and Hansen (2004). The results indicate that the estimated inflation threshold is different across the regional economic communities. Nonlinearity in inflation-growth nexus seems to hold in CEMAC, COMESA and SADC while it is questioned in WAEMU and WAMZ. For CEMAC, COMESA and SADC, the findings indicate that inflation above the threshold is harmful to growth. Some correlations are established in this study but further analysis is needed to suggest a policy.