Impact on Microeconomic Variables on Colombo Stock Exchange: The Sri Lankan Experience

Abstract

The main attempt of this study is to examine short and long run relationships between selected macroeconomic indicators such as, Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Consolidated Broad Money (M2b), Reserve Money, Petroleum Crude Oil Imports, Average Exchange Rates, Index of Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER), Government one-year Treasury Bills Rate (as a measure of interest rates), Gold Prices, and the All Share Price Index (ASPI). Johansen Cointegration, Vector Autoregressive Regression (VAR) and Vector Error Correlation Methodology (VECM) are mainly used to examine the long term and short term relationships with references to the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE), Sri Lanka, from monthly data during the period of 2010 to 2016. The results show the relationships in the long run from independent variables to the dependent variable ASPI. Furthermore, Wald statistical results detected that, as the Colombo Stock Market, CSE is more sensitive to external factors such as changes in Broad Money and Month-end Government Securities. The analysis presented in this study relies on data from CSE, Sri Lanka only. The contribution of this research is related to the analysis from a theoretical and empirical perspective of both domestic and international, and policy makers to make better investment decisions.