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Establishing Wagner's Law in the West Africa Monetary Zone (WAMZ)

This study tests Wagner’s Law (the tendency for government activities to expand along with economic expansion) for WAMZ using annual time series data between 1970 and 2005. It adopts the Bounds Test approach proposed by Pesaran et al. (2001) based on Unrestricted Error Correction Model and Toda and Yamamoto’s (1995) Granger non-causality tests. Empirical results from the Bounds Test indicate that there exists no long-run relationship between government expenditure and output in Nigeria, Gambia and Sierra Leone. In addition, the Toda and Yamamoto’s (1995) causality test results show that Wagner’s Law does not hold for over the period being tested for Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia and Sierra Leone. Although a long-run relationship between government expenditure and output in Ghana, economic growth and government activity were not found to reinforce each other.