Analysis of the impact of population growth on economic growth in kenya (1960 - 2021)

Abstract

The objective of this work is to study the impacts of population growth on economic growth in Kenya using demographic and macroeconomic variables that have links to economic growth theories and economy of Kenya, these variables are; life expectancy, population growth, total fertility ratio, gross domestic product growth rate, household non-profit institution serving households, gross domestic product per capita, exports of goods and service and general government final consumption expenditure for the period 1960 - 2021. We first used principal component analysis to detect redundant variables and essential correlations and we noticed that gross domestic product growth rate has no important correlation with all the variables and therefore we used gross domestic product per capita as our dependent variable since it had important correlations with the variables used. Thereafter, we used auto regressive distributed lag and the results showed that population growth affects the performance of the economy negatively.