Effect of Monetary Policies on Economic Performance of Anglophone ECOWAS

Although there have been efforts to advance the ECOWAS monetary cooperation agenda, political issues, and other economic concerns in some of the region's nations have hampered the progress to date. Part of the disagreement is associated with inadequate literature that lends experimental proof to monetary policy management for optimal gains. Therefore, this study seeks to examine the relationship between monetary policy strategies and economic performance in Anglophone ECOWAS. The study employed an ex-post facto research design. Secondary annual panel data from 1986 to 2020 for all the five (5) Anglophone ECOWAS were used for this study and sourced from World Development Indicators of the World Bank. The data were analysed using Panel Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (PNARDL) to explain the relationship and establish the effect of expansionary and contractionary monetary policies on economic performance.The monetary policies model estimated using the PNARDL revealed that the long-run estimated coefficients of the proxy for contractionary and expansionary monetary policy (decrease and increase in the money supply) are both positive and statistically significant. However, the short-run estimates revealed that both have a negative effect on economic performance.Monetary authorities in the Anglophone ECOWAS could consider implementing regulations and controls on expansionary monetary policy to stimulate economic performance. The research is limited to Anglophone ECOWAS. It appears that no ECOWAS country-specific or cross-country study has investigated the asymmetry relationship of the monetary policy-economic performance nexus; this heightened the need to address the blur in the extant literature and clarify the asymmetry relationship between monetary policy and economic performance in ECOWAS Anglophone.