The Dynamics of Foreign Public Debt and Foreign Exchange Reserve of Ethiopia: Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model Approach

Abstract

External public debt and foreign exchange reserve (FER) are performing a crucial role in the growth and development of countries. To examine the short-run and long-run dynamics among external public debt (EPD) and FER in Ethiopia, the study used 39 years data (1981 to 2019) from National bank of Ethiopia (NBE) and World Bank data sets. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model with error correction model (ECM) was employed after checking the possible assumptions of economic series. The results of ADF test statistics confirms our economic series are stationary with a mixture of level form and first difference form. Bounds co-integration test suggests the existence of co-integration among the variables. According to the descriptive method of data analysis, on average, in Ethiopia the trend for service sector indicated that an ever improvement of the sector throughout the periods and supplementing the notion of change from agriculture base to service sector. On the other hand, according to ARDL model in the short -run on average trade tariff rate, share of manufacturing sector from the GDP, and lagged value of EPD itself predicts the EPD significantly at least at less than 10% level of significance . Moreover, the ECM revealed that in the long-run, financial development indicator, debt service payment, and average trade tariff rate were predicting the stock of FER for Ethiopian economy. Finally, the concerned body, the government of Ethiopia, should limit or reduce the amount of external debt (ED) inflows, and recheck the budget sources for financing different projects especially manufacturing industries rather than highly basing on external sources in the form of EPD, among others.