Commodities Shocks and Macroeconomic Fluctuations in Africa, Does Resource-Status Matter?

Many economies in Sub-Saharan Africa have been dealing with cyclical and macroeconomic problems for a long time. These issues include fluctuating growth, high inflation, unstable exchange rates, etc., all of which are a result of changes in the price of commodities. The COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine-induced commodity price shocks, however, show that structural characteristics largely determine the macroeconomic responses of countries in the region. Surprisingly, most studies assessing the impact of commodity price shocks on macroeconomic performance in SSA largely ignore this dimension. This gap motivated this study. Using the bootstrap Granger causality test and the panel structural vector autoregressive (PSVAR) test, the study confirmed that there is a long-term relationship between some commodities and macroeconomic variables as well as the validity of different spillover effects of commodity price shocks based on resource status in the SSA region. Oil-rich countries are found to experience more intense effects of commodity price shocks than other countries