2 Methodology and research question & brief presentation of
Togo
2.1 Methodology and
research question
The dissertation will start by short presentation of Togo to
enable the readers to situate themselves geographically, historically,
culturally and socially
The method that will be use for identifying the explaining
factors of the Togolese foreign debt will involve the method of last squares
combined with validation tests but before that we must prove that the debt has
indeed increased. More precisely we will:
· Define what a public debt is and at which level can it
be considered as being excessive .We will define the key terms usually used in
the economic literature in relation with debt such as the term Debt itself,
public debt, foreign debt, foreign gross debt, foreign public debt, domestic
debt, domestic public debt, the service of the debt, concerted loans, the
outstanding, the stock of debt, the interest of the debt, the gift element,
public indebtness.
We will refer to the international monetary funds conception
of what is an excessive debt and we will borrow from RAFFINOT (1998) the
conditions that must be respected in order to be able to payback a public
debt.
· We will make a review of the literature about public
debt in order to identify the main causes of the debt according to researchers,
from this review we will choose the factors that we consider pertinent as
explaining factors in our econometric model.
· We will reviewing the consequences of the public debt
on the economy and the society in order to justify why it is important to
reduce it and the choice of the topic of this dissertation.
· Based on data collected we will analyse the structure
and the evolution of the public debt of Togo together with the evolution of
some pertinent indicators such as the ratio of foreign debt/ gross domestic
product, service of the debt/exportations, foreign debt/exportations, service
of the debt/gross domestic product, the evolution of the degree of openness of
the economy, and the evolution of the importations compared to the gross
domestic product.
· Specify the proposed econometric model by
précising the explained variable, the explaining variables, the
mathematical form of the model. The data consist of time series data, thus it
is important for the reliability of the model to make some important tests such
as staionarity test and cointegration test.
The source of the data that will be use for the analysis will
be :
· International monetary funds statistics
· Togo ministry of economy and finance data
· World banks website data
The main question that this dissertation is trying to answer
are :
· Can one identify the explaining factors of the public
debt of Togo by using an econometric analysis ?
· Can we explain the debt by importations trough the
ratio of importation divided b the public debt ? because This ratio reflects
the level of the importations compared to the capacity of creation of wealth of
the country and expresses the level of outflow of foreign currencies compared
to the total available resources of the country since importations are in
general paid in foreign currencies.
· What is the impact of demography on the level of the
foreign public debt?
· If the demographic growth tends to increase the debt,
what about the Gross domestic product per capita?
| 
