The Macroeconomic Determinants of Economic Growth in Zambia: Do Copper prices matter?

Bright Chizonde

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This research investigates the determinants of economic growth in Zambia using the Bounds Approach to Cointegration developed by Persaran (1999). Since Zambia’s economy is said to be dependent on copper mining, economic analysts postulate that economic growth in Zambia is dependent on international copper prices and thus externally determined. This is somewhat problematic because it absorbs policy makers and government of the responsibility to generate sustainable growth. In order to test the validity of this postulation, the study estimates an Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) Model with copper prices as one of the variables of interest. Estimation results indicate that, in the long-run, economic growth is determined by physical capital, exchange rate, inflation, crude oil price, government spending and agricultural productivity; international copper prices only influence growth in the short-run. Therefore, with proper planning and strategic policy interventions, Zambia can still achieve higher sustainable economic growth even when international copper prices are falling.

Keywords: Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) Model; copper prices; Economic growth; Zambia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E0 E5 E6 O1 O11 Q3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/87854/1/MPRA_paper_87854.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:87854

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().