The causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in Africa

ABSTRACT

Previous empirical studies on the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth are not instructive given their failure to unearth the causality trend across the different time periods. Using a more recently developed and robust indicator of financial development, we revisit the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth within the framework of a frequency-domain spectral causality technique which allows the causality to vary across time. Using data from 47 African countries over the period 1980–2016, our findings largely suggest that, even though there is some evidence of demand-following, supply-leading and feedback hypotheses, for most part, we find strong support of neutrality hypothesis. Thus, financial development and economic growth at most frequency levels evolve independently. We infer that caution must be exercised in making general conclusions about the causal nexus between financial development and economic growth.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial development
• economic growth
• frequency domain
• causality
• Africa

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• E44
• G10
• O16
• O40
• O55

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The countries are Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo Democratic Republic, Congo Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Arab Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia (The), Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia.