Population growth and its effect on labour productivity in Ghana

Abstract

This study analyzes population growth and its effect on labour productivity in Ghana. In addition to the main objective, the study looks at the various factors affecting overall labour productivity, labour productivity in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. The factors included in this study are government size, gross fixed investment, human capital, inflation, and trade openness. The study is founded on the data in Ghana from 1980-2019 by using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to define the long-run association between the variables. According to the empirical evidence, increased population growth would reduce overall labour productivity in Ghana’s economy in the long-run. No significant long-run impact was observed between population growth rate and labour productivity in the manufacturing sector. Finally, the research revealed that an increase in population growth would have more than a proportionate fall on agricultural labour productivity in the long-run.