MODELLING ECONOMIC FLUCTUATIONS IN SUBSAHARAN AFRICA:A VECTOR AUTOREGRESSIVE APPROACH

A controversial result of some current research on the real business cycles is the claim that a common stochastic trend(the cumulative effect of permanent shocks to productivity)underlies the bulk of economic fluctuations. If confirmed, this will imply that many other forces have been relatively unimportant over historical business cycles(including the monetary and fiscal policy shocks in traditional macroeconomic analysis). This paper therefore proposes to use a longrun restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models(identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trends in output, consumption and investment) to provide new evidence on this question(using subsaharan africa as a case study).