Convergence and Poverty Trap in Africa : New Evidence from Nonlinear Unit-Root and Quantile Regression

We investigate the nonlinear convergence of African economies as well as whether being stuck in a poverty trap. The former is explored by a modified KSS nonlinear unit root test in order to discriminate long-run converging from catching up, whereas the later is analyzed by both parametric and nonparametric approaches, not only in conditional mean, but also in different quantiles. Empirical results show that most African countries do not display convergence with respect to South Africa, while special attentions should be paid to those countries lie in the developing stage of per capita GDP levels between 900 and 2000, since they might be stuck in a poverty trap