Official Development Assistance and Economic Development: Evidence from the West African Monetary Zone

The goal of this paper is to examine the linkage between official development assistance (ODA) and economic development in the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ). The study made use of annualized data from six WAMZ countries from 1986 to 2015. The Panel OLS technique was employed to estimate our model. The findings revealed that official development assistance has significant negative effect on per capita income in the region. A unit change in ODA leads to 3.6% decline in GDP per capita within the period. External debt services however exert positive but insignificant impact on per capita income. The results further show that inflation rate has negative effect on GDP per capita. These findings were confirmed by orthonormal biplot analysis.