Solde Budgétaire, Croissance et Emploi en Côte d’Ivoire.

The objectives of the present paper were to determine how the fiscal balance, the level of employment and the economic growth evolved overtime in Côte d’Ivoire and to determine the direction of causality in the Granger sense between the fiscal balance, employment and growth. The data used for the study cover the period from 1976 to 2002. The empirical results suggest high positive correlation between the FDI, employment and GDP variables. A positive but weak correlation is found between the fiscal balance and growth. There is no cointegration relation between growth and the fiscal balance as well as between this later variable and the employment variable. With respect to causality, the results suggest a unidirectional causality from the fiscal balance towards growth. These results call for caution in the implementation of economic policies that focus too much on the fiscal balance to pull growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]