| During the past three decades,West African cities have witnessed a remarkable and,in many ways,unprecedented poverty,unemployment,and a demographic growth spurt.Despite their economic growth increases since 2001,African urban areas remain the pocket of poverty.International and national strategies adopted in most West African countries failed to achieve the ending of extreme poverty by 2015.To help policymakers in their decisions,several existing literature on the relationship between poverty unemployment and urbanization were available.However,missing of literature on multidimensional poverty and relationship including simultaneously poverty,unemployment and urbanization interaction are considerable.This study sought to research the relationship between poverty and unemployment with urbanization using a multidimensional approach.This study aims to find the possible corelationships between poverty and unemployment with urbanization in West Africa because urbanization has the potential to usher in a new era of well being.The present paper uses panel data from 15 West African countries spanning 17 years from 2000 to 2017 in a simultaneous equation to test the different hypotheses.The analysis technique is performed using Ordinary Least Square(OLS),Fixed Effects,and System Generalized Method of Moments(GMM),which is a superior estimator explaining heterogeneity bias.The causal relationship between the poverty,unemployment rate,and urbanization in West Africa is performed using the Dumitrescu & Hurlin(2012)Granger non-causality test.The results suggest that unemployment has a positive and significant impact(at 1 percent level)on poverty in West Africa.Shifting to the impact of unemployment on poverty in West Africa with urbanization as an interaction term,the results suggest that urbanization reduced the impact of unemployment on poverty in West Africa with negative and significant impact(at 1percent level)on poverty under OLS.Under the fixed-effect model,the results suggest that urbanization reduced the impact of unemployment on poverty in West Africa with a negative and significant impact(at 1 percent level)on poverty.Under system GMM,the results suggest that urbanization does not impact unemployment on poverty in West Africa with a negative but insignificant coefficient.Finally,on the impact of poverty on unemployment in West Africa,in OLS estimations,the results suggest that unemployment has a positive but insignificant impact on poverty in West Africa.Under the fixed-effect model,the results imply that poverty has a negative and significant impact(at 1 percent level)on unemployment in West Africa.Under system GMM,the results also imply that poverty has a positive and significant impact(at 1 percent level)on unemployment in West Africa. |
