A DCCE Approach to the Governance-growth Nexus: Global Perspective

Abstract

This study, being one of its kind by method and scope, delves into the effects of governance indicators on economic growth, using large panel datasets spanning from 2002 to 2020 for the world’s economies, income level economies, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members, and regional level economies that include 218 countries. In the presence of cross-sectional dependence and mixed integrating orders of the predictors, the results confirm a long-run nexus between governance and economic growth in the world and other panels. Using the dynamic common correlated effects model, the results indicate that governance predictors postulate significantly positive effects on economic growth, while the critical findings highlight that the scale of governance effects on growth varies in relation to the income level of the underlying economies in the panels, implying that the larger the economy, the higher the governance effects will be. Moreover, the results of the heterogeneous panel causality test reveal significantly strong unidirectional causality that runs from governance predictors to economic growth, while little evidence is found for feedback response and interdependencies between governance predictors in most of the panels. Based on the findings, appropriate policy recommendations are discussed.