NCID Research Assistant Héctor Cárcel presented his master thesis “Fractional Integration in the West African Economic and Monetary Union”, which he conducted under the supervision of Professor Luis Alberiko Gil-Alaña.

In his paper he examined the time series behavior of three variables (GDP, Price level of Consumption and Population) in the eight countries that belong to the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), which are Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo. The reason for carrying out this study originated in the considerable heterogeneity that can be perceived in the data from these countries. He conducted a long memory and fractional integration modeling framework and also identified potential breaks in the data. He only found strong evidence of mean reversion in the case of Senegal for the Price level of Consumption, and in the cases of Benin, Burkina Faso and Senegal for GDP.

One of his main conclusions was the fact that the WAEMU still exists today not due to economic and financial homogeneity among its country members, which he proves to not exist, but due to the historical and traditional ties that all these countries share as former French colonies.