Public Debt and Economic Growth in Niger: an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Approach

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to examine the existence or not of a long run or a short run relationship between public debt and economic in Niger and investigate the significance of this relationship. Approach/Methodology/Design: The study first applied time series econometrics tests such as Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test, Bound cointegration test and Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) on annual data obtained from the International monetary fund (IMF) and the West African States Central Bank (BCEAO). The observations cover the period from 1970 to 2019. The study then performed some residual tests including serial correlation, normality and heteroskedasticity for the accuracy of the prediction of the model. Findings: The empirical results showed no long run relationship between public debt and economic growth in Niger. The short run analysis revealed that public debt and budget balance have short run causal effects on economic growth in Niger. The coefficients are significant at 10% significance level. Practical Implications: This article gives valuable information to Niger policy makers regarding the effects of public debt on Niger economic growth. The article highlights the effects that public debt has on economic growth in Niger in the short and long run. Therefore helping policy makers decide whether to increase or reduce the borrowing trend. Originality/value: The results of the paper give valuable information on the relationship that public debt may have with economic growth in Sub Saharan African countries with the similar macroeconomic indicators with Niger.