An Investigation of Hemophilia, Consanguineous Marriages and Economic Growth: Panel MLP and Panel SVR Approach

Abstract

The study has two aims. The first is to investigate the interrelations of haemophilia, consanguineous marriages and their impacts on economic development. The second aim of the paper is to augment the panel regression techniques by incorporating them with Multi-Layer Perceptron neural networks models and Support Vector Machine methods. The extension is proposed to overcome the commonly criticized aspect of panel regressions, the inability to obtain homogeneity in panels. The study utilizes a panel data set that consists of 46 countries covering the 1980-2009 period and models are evaluated in terms of their ability to model the interrelations between the variables analysed. According to the empirical results, the proposed Panel Neural Network Multi-Layer Perceptron and Panel Support Vector Machine models provide success with this purpose. The empirical findings suggest that haemophilia and consanguineous marriages have significant effects on economic development. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.