This study investigates the causal relationship between military expenditure and economic growth by using a balanced panel of 35 African countries spanning 1990 to 2015. It uses the more recently developed bivariate heterogeneous panel causality, GMM and SGMM estimation techniques. The country-by-country causality results reveal:(i) no causal relationship between military expenditure and growth in seven countries; (ii) unidirectional causality from military expenditure to growth in two countries; (iii) unidirectional relationship from growth to military expenditure in fourteen countries; and (iv) bidirectional relationship in twelve countries. These findings imply: (i) that the seven African countries with no causality can pursue defence policy objectives independently from growth policy objectives; (ii) in the fourteen countries, the fact that growth causes military expenditure and not vice versa implies that, defence decisions are not made in a way as to relatively promote growth; (iii) two African countries effectively use military expenditure for growth aims, hence military expenditure causes growth; and (iv) the bidirectional causality in the 12 countries implies that both growth and defence policy objectives can be pursued together. The GMMs results show that military expenditure has a significant negative impact on growth in Africa.

The majority of empirical literature acknowledges that information and communication technology (ICT) has a favourable effect on economic growth/development. Different studies, however, contend that this impact is modest or perhaps null, yielding inconsistent findings. In view of this complication, we therefore conducted a study with the aim to analyse the ICT diffusion-economic growth-development nexus for 73 countries over the period 2000–2018. The panel data was divided into three regions, namely sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAAC). For the analysis, the newly developed panel vector autoregression (PVAR) in the generalised method of moments (GMM) estimation approach was applied. Our findings suggest a long-run equilibrium relationship between the three variables. The findings differ from the causality results for the overall panel and each of the regions differs. The inconsistency in the causality results across the regions suggests that the level of ICT diffusion is still underdeveloped. The PVAR-GMM results reveal that (i) ICT diffusion is a significant and positive predictor of growth across the regions, with a greater effect reported in MENA; (ii) ICT diffusion is a significant and positive predictor of development across the regions with a lesser effect noticed in MENA. The study’s implication for academia and practice is that (i) it provides important information on the ICT diffusion-economic growth-development nexus within the context of the econometric approaches used, and (ii) policymakers and managers of telecom businesses should accommodate sufficient support to further establish the ICT infrastructures and expand its penetration for all round sustainable and inclusive growth and development purposes.