Africa’s Growth Matter: The Macro-Level Entrepreneurial Orientation Lens for Insights into the Growth Black-Box?

Deploying Quintile regression and causality analysis, we exploit the within Africa heterogeneity in growth outcomes, over 3 decades, to examine the association between macro-level entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and economic growth across the conditional distribution to explain how African countries have grown or failed to grow. In addition to understanding how much macro-level EO provides additional growth in Africa, relative to natural resource rents and/or institutions, we also examined how Africa could perform as well as fast-growth countries when EO is properly exploited. We find that growth acceleration indeed stems from exploiting macro-level EO in high-growth countries, whereas Africa's occasional growth spurts have been largely driven by natural resource rents, with evidence that effectively cultivating macro-level EO can help Africa achieve sustainable kind of growth, such as has been experienced by fast-growth countries. This is a first and important application of the recently evolved measures of macro-level EO in providing additional vital insights into Africa's growth "black-box".