Substitution Between Private and Government Consumption in a Currency Area: The Case of the CFA Franc Zone

The current study aims at investigating the relationship between private and government consumption within CFA franc zone. In fact, since the decade 2000, most of these countries have launched ambitious spending programs in order to become emergent in the 2035 horizon. For this aim, we applied the cointegration approach of Ogaki (1992) and Ogaki and Park (1997) using panel data and country level analyses for the period 1985–2019. Results from the two methodologies indicate that private consumption and public expenditure are better described as Edgeworth-Pareto substitutes. Conventionally, this means that an increase in government spending decreases the marginal utility of private consumption. Consequently, fiscal stimuli in CFA franc countries are harmful since they crowd out the private consumption. However, in case these countries have to face a fiscal consolidation, the substitutability pattern between private and public consumption is likely to moderate the contractionary impact of cuts in government consumption.