The Nexus Between Taxation, Government Expenditure and Economic Growth in South Africa. A fresh evidence from combined cointegration test

Abstract

The relationship between taxation, government expenditure and economic growth. is a widely debated issue in the literature. The aim of this research is to present a fresh evidence from the nexus of taxation, government expenditure and economic growth in for the period 1991-2018 in South Africa, using recently developed combined co-integration test. Autoregressive Distributed Lag model(ARDL) is utilized to examine coefficients between the variables in the short and long-run The newly advanced Bayer-Hacks (BH) combined co-integration approach is employed so as to verify the ARDL bounds result. The empirical results from ARDL model revealed that there is a positive and significant relationship between government expenditure and economic growth in both short and long run. In addition, the study shows that tax revenue has a significant positive relationship with the economic growth. Therefore, levels of taxation and government expenditure are favorable to the growth of economy in South Africa. The research proposed that decision makers in South Africa should pay more attention on Taxation and government expenditure policies and the gains from economic growth such as channel much of its expenditure towards the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, which have great potentials of increasing the supply of the products. Which in turn leads to reduce prices and increase in the rates of employment. This would, also make the country’s exports prices competitive.