Monetary policy shocks and macroeconomic performance in regionally integrated common monetary area economies.

Abstract

The CMA (Common Monetary Area), comprising of South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, and Namibia, has experienced a steady improvement towards economic restructuring. This is due to recent global developments and economic integration where countries are coming together to form regional economic integration initiatives and coordinate their economic policymaking effectively. Just like the CMA countries, many countries, such as Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal, Finland, France, Belgium, Slovenia, Cyprus, Latvia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Malta, and Estonia, have come together to form a strong monetary union for the purpose of having a sound and effective monetary policy.This study traces how a shock or an unanticipated change in the central bank's policy instrument of South Africa (SA_REPO) affects the selected macroeconomic variables, such as the Real Gross Domestic Product Growth (RGDP_G), inflation (INF), money supply (MS), and lending rates (LRATE), in the entire CMA region. Employing a Panel Structural Vector Autoregressive model (Panel-SVAR) and annual data from 1980–2019, the findings show that a shock in the South African repo rate (SA_REPO) significantly affected the macroeconomic variables, such as RGDP_G, INF,LRATE and MS, in the entire CMA region. The results indicate that a shock in the South African repo rate is followed by a significant decline in the economic growth (RGDP_G), a decrease in inflation, a decrease in money supply and an increase in lending rates in the entire CMA region. The study recommends that CMA monetary authorities and policymakers need to formulate policies toward cushioning the effects of unanticipated monetary policy shocks from the anchor country as well as global shocks.