Could you be more specific? In what sense it is not significant? Do you mean it is low?

Can you provide examples of reputable Sub-Saharan African researches who use levels of per capita GDP as a proxy for changes (growth) in per capita GDP?

Hi Hammed Oluwaseyi Musibau,

GDP per capita is indeed the ratio of GDP to the total population. In developing countries, it is common that the growth of GDP per capita is not significant. It is quite understandable that as GDP grows highly, the population grows as well. In developing countries, the population tends to grow rapidly as health, nutrition and education are improved. Accordingly the growth of the GDP per capita is obscured by the growth of population. Eventually, GDP per capita will grow significantly when the population growth produces demographic bonus. Yet, to gain benefit from the demographic bonus, the counties need to achieve higher level of productivity.

Dear Misubau,

Researchers do also use economic advancement characteristics of the country of origin such as GPD to examine cross-national differences in immigrants’ labour market integration. See study of Christoph Spörlen and Frank van Tubergen. Even GDP per capita may be small, there are still differences among Sub-Sahara African countries. The question is if these differences are significant enough to predict their labour market integration in Western countries. This is an hypothesis we attempt to investigate across twelve sub-Saharan African immigrant groups in the Netherlands.

My new book on Productivity (2020) has a chapter on Africa but the starting point of any discussion has to be the work of Morten Jerven.