Briefing Paper

Determinants of Imports in Guinea – Policy Brief

The objective of this paper is to examine the factors that influence Guinea’s overall import demand using annual data covering the period 1980-2015. Through the Error Correction Model (ECM), we estimated the short- and long-term relationships to measure the effect of real investment expenditure, real effective exchange rate, real final consumption demand and trade policy on import demand, after testing the existence of a cointegration relationship between the different variables of the model. The results showed that in the short term as in the long term, the demand for real investment, the real demand for final consumption and the trade policy based on the adoption of the new tariff system from 2005 are the main determinants of the import request in Guinea. These results allowed us to draw some implications for economic policy.