This paper investigates the effect of country, gender and the associated interaction term on life expectancy in West African countries. The empirical analysis revealed that country and gender have statistically significant effect on life expectancy in West Africa, while the associated interaction term has no significant effect on life expectancy. Thus the removal of the nuisance interaction term seems to improve the predictive task of the statistical model. The empirical findings in this paper revealed that Cape Verde has the highest average life expectancy among all the West African countries, which also ranks highest in the United Nations index of West Africa. The Tukey HSD tests provide statistically significant differences between countries with higher life expectancy and countries with lower life expectancy. This accounts for the variation in life expectancy between the West African countries. Contrary to the notion in some previous reports which believed that countries with higher GDP tend to have a higher life expectancy, and that the difference in life expectancy per difference in GDP per capita is higher for poorer than for richer countries; this paper reveals that most West African countries endowed with natural resources resulting to higher GDP tend to have lower life expectancy.

life expectancy, statistical model, interaction, main effects, Tukey HSD tests