Sources of business cycles in a low income country

We examine the role of global and domestic shocks in driving macroeconomic fluctuations for Ghana. We are able to study the impact of exogenous shocks, including productivity, credit supply and commodity price shocks. We identify the shocks using a combination of sign and recursive restrictions within Bayesian vector autoregressive models. As a benchmark we provide results for South Africa to document the difference between two economies with similar structures but at different stages of development. We find that global shocks play a more dominant role in South Africa than in Ghana. These shocks operate through three channels: trade, credit and commodity prices.