Since their inception in 2006, the BRICS countries (Federative Republic of Brazil, the Russian Federation, the\nRepublic of India, the Peopleâ??s Republic of China and the Republic of South Africa) have been fully committed to the\nstrengthening and expansion of trade and investment ties between member states and the international world. However,\nit is important to empirically analyse whether the growth of these economies is driven by trade because the extensive\ntrade -growth studies have yielded mixed and inconclusive empirical results. Therefore, this study is an empirical\nattempt to investigate the relationship between trade openness and economic growth in the BRICS counties by utilizing\nthe Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds test to cointegration and the Granger causality tests for the period\nfrom 1990 to 2017. The presence of a long run relationship between trade openness and economic growth is confirmed\nin this study. Evidence from the bounds test of cointegration indicate that there exists a bi-directional causality from trade\nopenness to economic growth in the BRICS countries. Furthermore, this study provides evidence of a unidirectional\ncausality between trade openness and output growth, particularly in the case of China.
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