ICT, trade openness and economic growth in Tunisia: what is going wrong?

In the age of digital globalization, information and communication technologies (ICT) and international trade seem to have become the engines of economic growth. In this study, we investigate the impacts on Tunisia’s economic growth of using ICTs and greater trade openness. We employ a cross-section augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) model and apply Dumitrescu and Hurlin Granger causality test to panel data for 14 economic sectors in the period 1995–2018. The empirical findings suggest that use of ICTs has a long-term relationship with value added and increased economic growth in Tunisia. In addition, trade openness and gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) have a positive and significant effect on economic growth. We also examine the relationships among these variables in the short and long run. The Dumitrescu and Hurlin test reveals four bidirectional and two unidirectional causal relationships between the variables.