Due to the crucial role of credit in the economic activity of a country, there is a
growing empirical literature examining the determinants of domestic credit to the
private sector, which may be demand-side or supply-side factors. It is commonly
held that excessive domestic debt reduces private sector credit, raise bank lending
rates, and shrink output as the Government competes with the private sector for
private savings. For this reason, the aim of this paper is to determine whether persistent budget deficit in the Republic of North Macedonia negatively affects the private
sector’s access to bank credit, and hence slowing down the economic activity.
The analysis considers both, short-run and long-run relationship between domestic
credit to private sector provided by banks and budget balance in North Macedonia,
as endogenous variables, but also it takes into account the influence of several other
exogenous factors. The methodological approach is consisted of visual inspection
of the data, correlation analysis, co-integration and causality tests, as well as estimation of the impulse response function and variance decomposition. Based on the
estimated VECM model, the results show statistically significant long-run relationship between the endogenous variables, and no short-run causality in any direction.
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