Are Per Capita Real GDP Series in African Countries Non-stationary or Non-linear? What does Empirical Evidence Reveal?

This paper extends the applied time series literature in economic development, by testing whether the per capita real GDP time series in 27 African countries are non-stationary or non-linear and globally stationary over the relatively long period from 1960 to 2007. Using the non- linear unit root tests developed recently by Kapetanios, Shin and Snell (2003) the results show that in one-third of the countries, the series are stationary with non-linear mean reversion. Policy implications are indicated.Mean reversion, non-linear unit root tests, GDP per capita

Long Term Factors of Internet Diffusion in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Panel Co- Integration Analysis

Identifying factors that influence the diffusion of the Internet is paramount for researchers as well as policy makers in articulating strategies to improve the availability and subsequent use of the Internet. Most existing empirical studies have focused on this problem by analyzing diffusion data for countries for one fixed year and identified variables affecting the Internet diffusion. These variables, generally, come from the economic, technological, policy, culture, and human capital realms. These results have provided a good “snapshot” of what factors are important towards the diffusion of the Internet and the results tend to vary for studies conducted in different time frames. This paper also addresses, the phenomenon of cross-country dependence – the economic, political, and technological environment of one country affecting other countries- into account in their analyses. This paper, for the first time in the literature, empirically identifies long-term determinants of the Internet diffusion in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries by considering data for the period 1997-2013. It employs a recently-developed technique named “panel co-integration analysis” to model the diffusion of the internet among the SSA countries. The analysis reveals that in SSA countries, the number of telephones, the level of per capita real gross product and the extent of ruralization (conversely, the degree of urbanization) are the key long-term drivers of the diffusion of the Internet. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications

Studies of Phosphazenes: Part II*-Reactions of Hexachlorocyclotriphosphazatriene with N-Methylaniline

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Aggregate health care expenditure in the United States: new results

This research note, upon rectifying some inadvertently transposed entries in the observation matrix which was used in the authors' original article (Murthy and Ukpolo, 1994), using the maximum likelihood technique investigates whether in the United States during the period 1960-87, real per capita health care expenditure is related to real per capita income, the age structure of the population, number of practicing physicians, the relative price of health care and the ratio of public health care expenditure to total health care expenditure. While new results reveal the presence of two cointegrating vectors, the basic findings are consistent with the empirical evidence reported in the original paper.