Synchronisation des chocs d'offre et de demande dans la Communauté Economique des Etats de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (CEDEAO)

This paper focuses on the synchronization of supply and demand shocks in West Africa given the willingness of ECOWAS Heads of State to create a single currency by 2020. Based on the methodology of Blanchard and Quah (1989), the paper relies on structural autoregressive vector models (SVAR) to identify these shocks in the region. Unlike previous works in this area, it is innovative as it proposes a new way of analyzing the dynamic correlation of shocks in the region. In addition, the proposed study makes it possible to analyze the adjustment dynamics of macroeconomic variables to different shocks. The results show that the economies of the zone are marked by relatively high degrees of asymmetry in the sense that the responses to the same type of shock are different. However, the paper shows that the synchronization of shocks evolves over time between the countries in the region. Thus, the paper indicates the need to take into account the dynamic aspect of shocks, since a monetary union considered from the outset to be expensive may over time become beneficial