Does Globalization Promote Good Governance in Africa? An Empirical Study Across 51 countries

This study investigates the effect of globalisation on governance in 51 African countries for the period 1996-2011. Four bundled governance indicators and four globalisation (political, economic, social and general) variables are used. The empirical evidence is based on Instrumental Variable Quantile Regressions. The motivation for the estimation technique is that blanket governance-globalisation policies are not likely to succeed unless they are contingent on initial levels of governance and tailored differently across countries with low, intermediate and high levels of governance. The following findings are established. First, globalisation promotes good governance. Second, for the most part, the effect of globalisation is higher in terms of magnitude in the bottom quantiles of the political, institutional and general governance distributions. Third, the impact of globalisation is overwhelmingly higher in terms of magnitude in the top quantiles of the economic governance distribution.