Exploring the Interplay Between Civil Liberty, Technological Innovation, and Human Capital

While existing research has focused on analysing the relationship between democracy and innovation, they fall short on the conditions under which the effect works. We draw insights from the institutional and human capital theories to develop and test a simple theoretical model to examine the conditions under which civil liberty impacts technological innovation. Our empirical model based on a sample of 47 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1990–2022 using the conditional fixed effect Poisson regression. The empirical results revealed that civil liberty positively influences technological innovation. We further found that human capital negatively influences technological innovation. Finally, we found that the effect of civil liberty on technological innovation conditional on human capital is higher for low values of human capital and diminishes for high values of human capital. The results are robust when we include additional control variables. The study has important implications for technological innovation in sub-Saharan African countries in the context of civil liberty and human capital development.