AN INVESTIGATION OF LONGRUN RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMIC GROWTH, INVESTMENT AND EXPORT IN ROMANIA

The objective of this study was to estimate the long-run relationship between economic growth, investment and export in Romania using trimestrial data from the National Bank of Romania as well as National Statistical Institute. The econometric methodology employed was the Cointegration and Granger Causality test. First, the stationarity properties of the data and the order of integration of the data were tested using the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test. We found that the variables were non-stationary in levels, but stationary in first differences; that is, they are integrated of order one (I (1)). Since we used single equation model(s), the application of Johansen multivariate approach to cointegration was necessary to test for the long-run relationship among the variables. The result showed the existence of a single cointegration equation between the variables. The result of the Granger causality test shows a bidirectional relationship between investment and economic growth and also a bidirectional relationship between investment and exports but the result of the causation between export and growth was statistically insignificant.