Sectoral Banking Credit Facilities and Non-Oil Economic Growth in Saudi Arabia: Application of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)

The study aimed to investigate the impact of sectoral bank credit facilities provided by commercial banks on the non-oil economic growth in Saudi Arabia. Bank credit facilities are given for nine economic sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, mining, electricity and water, health services, construction, wholesale and retail trade, transportation and communications, services, and finance sector. The study employs annual data from 1970 to 2019. The study employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to identify the long-run and short-run dynamics relationships among the variables. The main results reveal that the overall impact of total bank credit has a significant and positive effect on non-oil economic growth in KSA. The results revealed that the effect of bank credit on the non-oil GDP growth in the short and long run was uneven. The study finds that all sectors have a positive and significant impact in the long run, except for the agricultural and mining sectors. Likewise, all sectors have a positive and significant impact in the short run, except for construction, finance, services, and transportation & communications. As a result, bank credit facilities in different sectors have played an important role in enhancing the non-oil economic growth in the KSA.