Capital Flight, Hard Mineral Resources Exports and Political Governance Crisis in the Central African Republic: How Far We have Learned?
Abstract The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration is applied to examine the role of political governance crisis in the relationship between hard mineral resources exports particularly diamond, and gold and Capital flight in the Central African Republic over the period of 1978-2010. The results of short-run show that official development assistance, gross national expenditures have a negative and significant impact on capital flight while the interaction of political governance crisis and hard mineral resources, GDP per capita have a positive and significant effect with capital flight. Moreover, governance crisis, exports of hard mineral resources has a negative and insignificant impact on capital flight. The results of the long run show a negative and significant effect on governance crisis, official development assistance and gross of national expenditures. The interaction term between hard mineral resources and GDP growth have a positive and significant effect on capital flight. However, export of hard mineral resources exhibits a positive but insignificant effect on capital flight. Without strong action to stop and promote political governance stability and the implementation of appropriate reforms at institutional level in CAR’s hard minerals resources sector, success in the fight against capital flight is unlikely.