Stock Market Development and Economic Growth: Ardl Causality in Pakistan

Contemporary economies of developing countries are changing due to rapid changes in the world economy. The emergence of international financial industry for worldwide network of transactions altered the role of international economy. Increased financial flows have altered the role of private capital and subsequently effect resource allocation. The economies of developing countries are witnessing changes in the composition of capital flows because world equity market is expanding rapidly. Foreign direct investment (FDIs) and stock market boom are the indicators of the changing world economic order. Earlier, most of the developing nations were facing serious liquidity problems thus compromising economic growth. Now, it is important to study how the changes in financial sector contributed in the overall growth of the economy. This paper endeavors to investigate whether there is a relationship between stock market development and economic growth in case of developing economy such as Pakistan. The data set covers annual times series data from 1971 to 2006. We employed two new tests, i.e., DF-GLS, and Ng-Perron to find integrating order of the said variables of the study. To test long-run robustness, J-J Co-integration and ARDL bounds testing techniques are applied. To investigate long-run causal linkages and short-run dynamics, Engle-Granger causality and ARDL tests are applied respectively. After finding order of integration, our findings suggested that there exist a very strong relationship between stock market development and economic growth. EngleGranger-Causality estimation confirms in the long-run, there is bi-directional causality between stock market development and economic growth. However, for short-run, there exist only one-way causality, i.e., from stock market development to economic growth.