IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jitecd/v31y2022i5p798-809.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The investment volatility-dampening role of foreign aid in poor sub-Saharan African countries

Author

Listed:
  • Mehmet Balcilar
  • Godwin Olasehinde-Williams
  • Berkan Tokar

Abstract

Sustained investment is required for economic growth. Investment however often experiences severe volatility in poor countries, making spending plans difficult to formulate, and diminishing growth potentials. Foreign aid serves as an important source of complementary financing for sustained investment. This paper thus studies the effect of aid inflows on total investment volatility in 19 heavily indebted poor sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1980–2018. Employing the cross-sectionally augmented distributed lag (CS-DL) estimation technique for long-run coefficients in dynamic heterogeneous panels with cross-sectional dependence along with bootstrap panel causality testing, we show that aid has an inverse relationship with investment volatility. We thus conclude that aid can be viewed as a dampening factor for investment volatility in poor countries. We also show that the ability of sudden reductions in aid inflows to trigger investment volatility is bigger than the ability of sudden increases in aid inflows to lower investment volatility.

Suggested Citation

  • Mehmet Balcilar & Godwin Olasehinde-Williams & Berkan Tokar, 2022. "The investment volatility-dampening role of foreign aid in poor sub-Saharan African countries," The Journal of International Trade & Economic Development, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(5), pages 798-809, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jitecd:v:31:y:2022:i:5:p:798-809
    DOI: 10.1080/09638199.2022.2030392
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09638199.2022.2030392
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09638199.2022.2030392?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jitecd:v:31:y:2022:i:5:p:798-809. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJTE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.