Financial Deepening, Stock Market, Inequality and Poverty: Some African Evidence

This paper presents evidence about the relationship between private credit, stock market indicators, income inequality and poverty, using the annual data that ranges from 1992 to 2018 on nine African economies. We applied the estimation method of Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) to model the long-run effect. In Addition, we used Dumitrescu and Hurlin Panel causality to check the direction of causality. The results of long-run estimates show that the stock market indicators have a significant positive impact on income inequalities, but have a negative and significant impact on poverty. Further, our findings show that private credit adversely reduces income inequalities. Our results also establish significant short-run causalities among stock market indicators, private credit, income inequalities, and poverty.