Comparison of Macroeconomic Performance of Selected sub- Saharan African Countries

ABSTRACT: This study investigates the comparison of economic performance in four selected African countries which includes South Africa, Cameroon, Kenya and Ghana and attempts to analyze the nature of the effects of selected parameters on long run economic growth both at individual country level and also collectively. The sample period of the analysis is in between 1980-2010. The results presented in this study is on the comparative analysis that was done based on long term average and the short term average measures of the economic growth ranging from 1980-1990, 1991-2000 and 2001-2010 respectively, looking into six macroeconomic parameters that include inflation, investment rate, rate of trade openness, government debt, gross inflow of FDI and government consumption expenditures all as a percentage of GDP in order to compare the performance of all these countries according to these parameters, in addition econometric analysis was carried out based on all of these parameters in other to test for their relationship with growth rate of GDP. Multiple regression analysis has been applied both at individual country level and also collectively utilizing panel estimation method for all the four countries in the sample of the study. From the regression analysis for the individual country results suggested that investment, FDI, government debt, government consumption expenditure has a positive relationship with growth, On the other hand inflation and trade openness has been found to have a negative effect on growth for all the countries, all of these results are significant for all the countries except for inflation, export and government consumption expenditures. But in the case of Cameroon inflation was found to affects growth in a negative way but the result shows a significant result for Cameroon. Furthermore the panel results shows for all the countries together as Investment, FDI, Debt, consumption expenditures have positive effects on growth, inflation has a negative effect on growth, and the result shows that all of these are significant except for inflation and government consumption expenditures. Keywords: Growth rate, Investment, Inflation, Exports, Foreign direct. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………