The purpose of this paper was to study the influence of R&D (which included capital, labour and human capital) on economic development in the West African sub-region. However, due to unavailability of data to cover these variables, proxies were used to represent the independent variables. The proxies used were gross fixed capital formation, GDP per person employed, government expenditure on tertiary education as a percentage of GDP and gross enrolment ratio of both sexes to represent capital, labour, R&D and human capital respectively. The study covered all the 15 member-states of the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS). The study covered a period of 2001-2014. The Generalised Least Squares (GLS) method of estimation was adopted with a panel dataset. The findings revealed that the variables had positive impact on the economy while R&D did influence GDP per capital significantly though weakly positive.