外債對經濟成長之影響: 蒙古案例

Abstract

This research examines the impact of external debt on economic growth in Mongolia over the period 1992–2016. Recent external borrowing surge in Mongolia brought its traditionally low external debt to new height, making it one of the most indebted countries in the world. Theoretical and empirical literature suggests excessive amount of debt has detrimental effect on economic growth of a country. Two separate models were employed in this study, one with simple OLS regression and another is four variable VECM involving GDP, Capital stock, Labor and Debt service. Using simple OLS, earlier study found positive significant relation between external debt stock and GDP, while result of this study with same model specification and newer data reveal positive but weaker relation, leading to the conclusion that the effect has been diminishing in recent years. In the multivariate model, Johansen cointegration test found one cointegrating rank among the four variables. Further, the result of VECM shows there is negative relation between GDP and Debt service in the long-run. Granger causality test provides support for uni-directional causality running from Debt service to GDP. Implication of this result is 10 percent increase in debt service cause 1% decrease in aggregate production. The results of this study are somewhat inconclusive in a sense that stock of external debt had positive but diminishing effect on growth, while debt service had negative effect. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that debt service variable is included in Model 2 as a proxy of overall debt burden of a country and highly correlated with stock of external debt. Thus, from the result of Model 2, one could argue overall effect of debt was negative in the long-run.