Demography and Economic Growth in Namibia

Abstract

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the influence of demographic change on economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Namibia. Annual data covering 42 years for total fertility rate, infant mortality rate, age-dependence ratio, population growth and per capita gross domestic product are used to provide insights into how changing demographics of Namibia society may impact its future economic growth. Several techniques including the Autoregressive Distributed Lag bound test, Granger causality test and variance decomposition are utilized in the analysis. The findings reveal the existence of a long-run relationship between economic growth and the key demographic variables. The findings also point toward the presence of a unidirectional causality running from demographic variables to economic growth. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that demographic events account for Namibia's economic growth and subsequently its economic development over the studied period.