Impact of International Financial Inflows on Economic Growth of West African Countries. Evidence from Panel ARDL.

This study examines the impact of international financial inflows on the economic growth of West African countries over the period 1986–2024. Specifically, it evaluates the impacts of foreign direct investment (FDI), personal remittances (REM), and official development assistance (ODA) on economic growth within the sub-region. Using annual panel data sourced from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the study employed the panel unit root analysis as well as the Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator within the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) framework to capture both short-run dynamics and long-run relationships among the variables. Results indicate that foreign direct investment has positive but statistically insignificant impact on economic growth, while personal remittances and official development assistance (ODA) exert positive and statistically significant impact on economic growth in the long run, on the other hand, official development assistance exhibits a negative relationship with economic growth. The study recommends among others that West African economies should implement pragmatic polies that are aimed at attracting productivity enhancing FDI for long term.