Money-income Link in Developing Countries: a Heterogeneous Dynamic Panel Data Approach

The question whether real money causes real output appears to be important for many economists working in the area of macroeconomics and, has been subjected to a variety of modern econometric techniques, producing conflicting results. One often applied method to investigate the empirical relationship between money and real activity is Granger causality analysis [Granger (1969)]. Using this approach, the causality question can be sharply posed as whether past values of money help to predict current values of output. This concept, however, should be clearly distinguished from any richer philosophical notion of causality [cf. Holland (1986)]. Present paper examines the relationship between money (both M1 and M2) and income (Real GDP) for 15 developing countries using a newly developed heterogeneous dynamic panel data approach.1 Sims (1972) postulated “the hypothesis that causality is unidirectional from money to income agrees with the post war U.S. data, whereas the hypothesis that causality is unidirectional from income to money is rejected”. Since then a voluminous literature has emerged testing the direction of causality.2 Some studies have tested the relationship between these variables and the direction of causality for a particular country using time series techniques [e.g., Hsiao (1979) for Canada, Stock and Watson (1989) for U.S. data, Friedman and Kuttner (1992, 1993) for U.S. data, Thoma (1994) for U.S. data, Christiana and Ljungquist (1988) for U.S. data, Davis and Tanner (1997) for U.S. data, Jusoh (1986) for Malaysia, Zubaidi, et al. (1996) for Malaysia, Biswas and Saunders (1998) for India, and Bengali, et al. (1999) for Pakistan]. Other studies have tested the above on a number of countries, for example Krol and Ohanian (1990) used the data for Canada, Germany, Japan and the U.K. Hayo (1999) using data from 14 European Union (EU) countries plus Canada, Japan, and the United States. More recently Hafer and Kutan (2002) used a sample of 20 industrialised and developing countries. This paper contributes to this later strand of the literature, which it extends in three directions. First, it employed a newly developed panel cointegration technique [Larsson, et al. (2001)], to examine the long-run relationship between money and income. Second, the study performs panel causality test, recently developed by Hurlin and Venet (2001), to explore the direction of causality between the said variables. Third, the important contribution of the present study is to test whether relationship between money and income is homogeneous or heterogeneous across countries.