Interest Rate Pass-through in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CAEMC) Area: Evidence from an ADRL Analysis

This paper examines the monetary transmission mechanism in the countries of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CAEMC). Specifically, we focus on the very first step of this mechanism namely the interest rate pass-through from short-term interest rates towards long-term rates. Using an autoregressive distributed lag (ADRL) model, we show that there is evidence of a very low and incomplete long-run pass-through from the policy rate to the deposit rate. It appears also that the lending rate exhibits a huge overshooting effect in reaction to the changes in the policy rate. When splitting our time span in two interest rate cycles, we show that there is evidence of an interest rate cycle asymmetry.