Purpose

This paper investigates whether institutional environment influences the relationship government spending and economic growth in ECOWAS over the period 2008–2017.

Design/methodology/approach

The study adopts the recently developed panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) by Abrigo and Love (2015) and a two-step system generalised method of moment (GMM).

Findings

The results from the study show no evidence of either unidirectional or bidirectional causal relationship between government spending and economic growth in ECOWAS. Our findings reveal that government spending when associated with high level of corruption, oversized government and a waste of public resources will not cause economic growth.

Originality/value

Unlike previous studies, we resolve the inherent problems of endogeneity and persistence in economic data. Likewise, we depart from existing studies that examined the causal relationship in a bivariate framework and adopt a trivariate causality testing.

中文翻译：

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政府支出与经济增长：三因素因果关系检验

目的

本文调查了制度环境是否影响了2008-2017年期间西非经共体的政府支出与经济增长之间的关系。

设计/方法/方法

该研究采用了Abrigo and Love（2015）最近开发的面板向量自回归（PVAR）和两步系统广义矩方法（GMM）。

发现

研究结果表明，没有证据表明西非经共体的政府支出与经济增长之间存在单向或双向因果关系。我们的发现表明，政府支出与高水平的腐败，过大的政府以及浪费的公共资源相关联，不会导致经济增长。

创意/价值

与以前的研究不同，我们解决了经济数据内生性和持久性的内在问题。同样，我们脱离了在双变量框架中检查因果关系并采用三变量因果关系检验的现有研究。