The impact of structural change in exports on economic growth in West Africa: cointegration and causality analysis

Abstract

The paper used the Panel Vector Autoregression(VAR) and Generalized method of moments (GMM) to view the impact of structural Change in export on economic growth in West Africa. Due to many challenges African export is the lowest compare to other regions in the world. The similarity of the export of many countries in West Africa is responsible for the trend it exhibits. The results of our analysis have shown that the shocks in Export levels have a direct impact on the contemporaneous GDP growth, while the current GDP growth change affects Export only in the future also there is a short run relationship between the GDP, the Export and the Import. The structural change occurs in the Export and the Import is responsible for the change in the GDP growth holding other things constant.