Ouverture commerciale, production pétrolière et croissance économique au Tchad : Ruptures structurelles et dynamiques sur la période 1990-2024

Abstract

This study re-examines the relationship between trade openness, petroleum activity, and economic growth in Chad over 1990-2024. It distinguishes physical petroleum production, constructed from monthly Energy Information Administration data, from oil rents as a share of GDP, available from the World Development Indicators through 2021. The empirical strategy combines descriptive analysis, structural-break and stationarity tests, dynamic regressions with HC3 and Newey-West standard errors, influence diagnostics, and complementary ARDL bounds testing. The results show that the post-2003 petroleum regime does not significantly alter the average level of growth. The 2004 boom is a highly influential one-off shock. Once it is isolated, the marginal effect of trade openness during the petroleum era is negative, although sensitive to the exceptional 2002 observation. Changes in physical production have no robust effect, whereas changes in oil rents generate a positive short-run impulse. Interactions between openness and petroleum variables are not statistically robust. ARDL tests do not establish a stable cointegrating relationship, and the error-correction coefficients are not significant. The findings therefore suggest that neither openness nor extraction automatically translates into sustained per capita growth. The central policy challenge is to convert external revenues and trade flows into productive capacity, diversification, and domestic linkages.