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The twin deficits hypothesis in the SAARC countries: an empirical investigation

Twin deficits hypothesis postulates that there is a strong positive linear relationship between a country's budget deficit and its current account deficit. This paper empirically investigates the existence of this relationship in five South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries using time-series data for the period 1980–2012. The paper uses cointegration analysis, error correction modeling and Granger causality test under a vector autoregression framework. The results show that the direction of causality for the SAARC countries is mixed. The findings confirm that budget deficit causes current account deficit for Pakistan and Sri Lanka, whereas the reverse is true for India and Nepal. The direction of causality is found to be unidirectional from current account deficit to budget deficit in the short run for Bangladesh.