The impact of trade openness on economic growth: The case of Cote d'Ivoire

The relationship between trade openness and economic growth has been extensively investigated yielding to mixed and inconclusive results. This might be attributed to the omission of the role of capital stock and labor in the trade-growth nexus. This paper examines the impact of trade openness on economic growth for Cote d'Ivoire over the period 1965-2014 in a multivariate framework including capital stock, labor and trade openness as regressors. It uses the Autoregressive Distributed Lag bounds test to cointegration and the Toda and Yamamoto Granger causality tests. The results show that trade openness has positive effects on economic growth both in the short and long run. Furthermore, they reveal a positive and strong complementary relationship between trade openness and capital formation in promoting economic growth.