Does Institutional Quality Influence the Oil price-economic Growth Nexus: Evidence from African Oil Exporting Economies

Abstract

The primary contribution of this study is to investigate how institutional quality affects the relationship between the oil price changes and economic growth on net oil exporters in African countries split into net oil exporters and net oil importers. Whether oil price changes are good for the growth patterns of African economies lies on the interaction between oil prices and institutional quality. Oil price increases for oil exporting economies result in increased revenue which will be distributed to economic boosters of the economy however, the net effect of such revenues to the economies solely depends on how institutions distribute the oil rents to the various sectors of the economy. In contrast to the traditional direct effect of oil price changes to economic growth, this study shows that the impact of oil price on economic growth is non-monotonic in institutional quality. Oil exporting economies can benefit from oil price increase if they have good institutions. This has been assessed by including an interaction term, oil price-institutional quality, in the Panel Auto-Regressive (PARDL) using the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) model. Such a methodological framework has an added advantage over other model as it allows for modelling of data with different orders of integration. The PMG estimator allows the intercepts, short-run coefficient, and the error variance to differ freely across groups while the long-run coefficients are the same. Using data from 1990 to 2016, it is revealed that the sign of the coefficient interaction is positive and significant as theoretically expected. Furthermore, the coefficient of the interaction term is greater than the coefficient of oil price as anticipated. This would mean that as long as institutional quality is good enough, oil price changes positively influence economic performance on oil exporting economies. As such, the findings of this thesis have important policy implications. Since implementation of quality institutions is an on-going process, the study results suggest that institutions should be strengthened towards economic activities rather than for political mileage.