THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MONETARY POLICY AND PRIVATE SECTOR CREDIT IN SADC COUNTRIES

Abstract

This paper empirically examined the relationship between monetary policy and private sector credit in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) group of countries using a panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) co-integration technique for the period from 2009 to 2018. The Hausman test result indicated that the null hypothesis of long-run homogeneity cannot be rejected and hence we accept the pooled mean group estimators (PMGE) as a consistent and efficient estimator. The PMGE results showed that credit to the private sector and gross domestic product have a positive and statistically significant long-run impact on money supply. The impact of credit to the private sector on money supply is shown by the results to be statistically significant and positive both in the short and long run. The impact of gross domestic product on money supply was found to be statistically significant positive in the long run while positive but insignificant in the short run. The study recommends policy attention that is directed towards the appetite for accelerated growth, investment, and employment in the SADC region but more importantly with more regard to the establishment of sustained macroeconomic stability as a precondition to sustainable growth and for the creation of monetary union in the region.