توسعه مالی، درجه باز بودن تجاری و رشد اقتصادی در کشورهای آفریقایی: بینش های جدید از روش علیت پانل

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth for 21 African countries within a framework which also accounts for international trade. We develop a financial development index based on four different financial development indicators and apply the panel bootstrapped approach to Granger causality. The empirical results show limited support for the finance-led growth and the trade-led growth hypotheses. The results imply that recent attempts at financial development and trade liberalization do not seem to have made a significant impact on growth.

It is argued that the level of financial development and the degree of international trade openness are among the most important variables the empirical economic growth literature suggests as being highly correlated with growth performance across countries (Beck, 2002 and Sachs and Warner, 1995). Financing constraints prevent poor countries from taking full advantage of technology transfer and this causes some of these countries to diverge from the growth rate of the world production frontier (Aghion et al., 2005). Poor countries with an underdeveloped financial system are trapped in a vicious circle, where poor financial development leads to poor economic performance and in turn, poor economic performance leads to poor financial development (Fung, 2009). In contrast, countries with a better-developed financial system tend to grow faster and therefore finance is not only pro-growth but also pro-poor suggesting that financial development helps the poor to catch up with the rest of the economy as it grows (see inter alias, Demirgüç-Kunt and Levine, 2009 and Baltagi et al., 2009). Moreover, the endogenous growth theory as articulated by Greenwood and Jovanovic (1990) and Bencivenga and Bruce (1991) and others also stresses that financial development is an important factor in fostering long-run economic growth as finance is able to facilitate growth by enabling efficient intertemporal allocation of resources, capital accumulation and technological innovation (see Levine, 2005). Furthermore, the theoretical model of Blackburn and Hung (1998) also predicts that both financial development and international trade liberalization enhance economic growth. What is unclear, however, is whether these potential benefits of financial development and trade liberalization are being reaped by African countries. There is, however, an opposing view that economic growth and financial development may evolve independently of each other. This is the neutrality hypothesis (Lucas, 1988). This paper, therefore, seeks to explore whether or not financial development and international trade have a role in the growth process in Africa in the light of the limited, conflicting and inconclusive results of prior studies.1

This paper examined the causal relationships between financial development, trade openness, and economic growth for 21 SSA countries during the period 1965–2008 within a trivariate bootstrapped panel causality analysis. We developed a financial development index from four financial development indicators using principal component analysis and applied to a panel causality analysis which accounts for cross-country dependency and country-specific heterogeneity. The empirical results indicate that out of the 21 countries studied we find support for the ‘demand following’ hypothesis in only in one country and for the ‘supply leading’ hypothesis in three countries. Similarly, we found limited causal relationship between financial development and trade openness. The hypotheses of finance-led growth and trade-led growth seem to be rejected for the overwhelming number of the 21 SSA countries studied during the period 1965–2008. Overall, the evidence seems to indicate that despite the past liberalization efforts in financial development and international trade, there is still very limited support for the hypothesis that financial development leads economic growth in SSA countries.