You, Kefei ORCID: 0000-0001-7253-5838, Dal Bianco, Silvia and Amankwah-Amoah, Joseph (2020) Closing technological gap to achieve the sustainable development goal of poverty alleviation: Evidence from 17 sub-Sahara African countries. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 157:120055. ISSN 0040-1625 (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.120055)

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Abstract

This paper examines the dynamics of technological catching-up and its effects in contributing to poverty alleviation, a crucial pillar of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Using data of 17 Sub-Sahara African (SSA) countries and employing the superlative-index number methodology, we first estimate the Total Factor Productivity (TFP) gap between these African nations with the USA (leader of advanced countries) as well as China (leader of developing countries) to provide a measure for technological catch-up that is comparable across the African countries. We then investigate the contribution of SSA technological dynamics to poverty alleviation using system Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) method. Our results show that during 1987-2014, many African nations have experienced some technological catching-up with the USA, whilst only a few of them have managed to briefly catch-up with China until early the 2000s and after which such catching-up is no longer observed due to the exceptional technological advance achieved by China in the past fifteen years. We find that closing technological gap has had significant poverty alleviation effect for African nations, although such effect is weaker in the case of TFP gap vis-à-vis China. Our paper highlights the important role played by technological progress in alleviating poverty.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Technological progress; technological gap; poverty; Africa; sustainable development goals
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5601 Accounting H Social Sciences > HG Finance
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Business Faculty of Business > Department of Accounting & Finance
Last Modified:	23 Nov 2021 01:38
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/27597

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