TITLE:
Agricultural Exports and Economic Growth: A Disaggregated Analysis for Ghana
AUTHORS:
Anthony Siaw, Yuansheng Jiang, Robert Becker Pickson, Rahman Dunya
KEYWORDS:
Economic Growth, Cocoa Export, Banana Export, Pineapple Export, Ghana
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.8 No.11,
August
13,
2018
ABSTRACT: Examining the correlation
between agricultural exports and economic growth, a study was carried out in
Ghana at the disaggregate level using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)
model with yearly time series data spanning from 1990Q1-2011Q4 to advise policy
makers on the dynamics of growth. Both the long-run and the short-run results
reveal that, cocoa export has a positive and significant impact on economic
growth whiles the export of pineapple and banana has negative effect on economic growth even though pineapple export is not significant in both long run and short run. In addition, the study found unidirectional causality running from banana
to economic growth, a bi-directional causal relationship between cocoa export
and economic growth and no causality between economic development and pineapple
export in Ghana. As a result, the study recommends that the performance of
Ghana Export Promotion Authority and Ghana Free Zones Board should be made
public in other to grab the awareness of foreign investors, and by so doing, it
would provide access to global markets to Ghanaian exporters. There is also the
need for the government of Ghana to bring into force structural changes which
will ensure that additional values are added to them hither to their
exportation.