Capital account and financial development in Tunisia: Causality and long-term relationship

Much research has focused on the relationship between financial development and growth, on the one hand, and the relationship between financial integration and economic development, on the other. However, the link between capital account liberalization and financial development remains limited, particularly for the Middle East and North African countries. The purpose of this article is to propose an empirical analysis of this relationship in the case of Tunisia, a country that has chosen for several decades to gradually open up to foreign capital. The econometric study carried out over the period 1986-2014 using a Toda-Yamamoto long-term causality model in conjunction with an ARDL model showed that the capital account openness did indeed have a positive effect on long-term financial development. This result is robust to several specifications of the autoregressive model and to alternative measures of financial development. Nevertheless, the short-term impact of the capital account openness is more limited, especially when considering the effects on the stock market.