Econometric studies on flexible modeling of developing countries in growth analysis

Over the last four decades, several methods for selecting the smoothing parameter, generally called the bandwidth, have been introduced in kernel regression. They differ quite a bit, and although there already exist more selection methods than for any other regression smoother we can still see coming up new ones. Given the need of automatic data-driven bandwidth selectors for applied statistics, this review is intended to explain and compare these methods. The Africa-Dummy has been identified and different explanations for its appearance have been published. In this paper, the issue of the empirical identification of the Africa-Dummy is addressed. We introduce a fixed effects regression model to identify the Africa-Dummy in one regression step so that its correlations to other coefficients can be estimated. A semiparametric extension of this model checks whether the Africa-Dummy is a result of misspecification of the functional structure. Furthermore, we show that sub-Saharan African countries have a positive return to the population growth and when adding interaction effects, the Africa-Dummy is even positive. Moreover, we show that the Africa-Dummy changes dramatically over time and the punishment for sub-Saharan African countries decreases incrementally since the mid-nineties. According to the Augmented Solow Growth model, it was even insignificant since the end-nineties ...