The impact of macro-economic variables on stock market performance; evidence from Sri Lanka

Abstract

Investigations of relationship between macro-economic factors and performance of stock markets at many emerging economies including that of Sri Lanka are relatively limited on one hand and required to be repeated as the underlying economic settings of such economies have rapidly changed over the years. Post war economic context and subsequent macro-economic revitalizations in Sri Lanka influenced the performance of capital market of Sri Lanka and hence the investigations on ‘how does and at what extent the Sri Lankan stock market responds to such macroeconomic developments?’ is an important empirical question. This study thus investigates the relationships between the All share price index of Colombo stock exchange and five macroeconomic variables, namely, Gross domestic product (GDP), Inflation proxied by wholesale price index(WPI) , Interest rate (IR), Balance of payment (BP) and Exchange rate (ER) over the period from 1980 to 2012. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) is used to estimate the parameters of the regression model, with the application of linear, linear- log, log- log and log- linear data transformation for choosing the appropriate model fitting the data. The serial correlation problem was tested using Durbin-Watson statistics. In this study, DurbinWatson statistics of the log-log model, which had the highest R2 of 82%, was 1.88 confirming that there was no serial correlation issue. The analysis reveals that macroeconomic variables and the stock market index (All share price index) in Sri Lanka are significantly related. It is observed that the stock market index significantly positively relates to GDP, ER and IR while it negatively relates to inflation proxied by wholesale price index of Sri Lanka. The Balance of payment is found to be insignificant in determining the stock market performance in Sri Lanka