Export-led Growth: A Survey of the Empirical Literature and Some Noncausality Results

Judith A. Giles, (jgiles@uvic.ca) and Cara L. Williams
Additional contact information
Judith A. Giles,: Department of Economics, University of Victoria, https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Judith Anne Clarke (jaclarke@uvic.ca)

No 9901, Econometrics Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Victoria

Abstract: The economic development and growth literature contains extensive discussions on relationships between exports and economic growth. One debate centers on whether countries should promote the export sector to obtain economic growth. An abundant empirical literature on this export-led growth (ELG) hypothesis has followed. We contribute to this literature in two ways. First, we provide a comprehensive survey of more than one hundred and fifty export-growth applied papers. We describe the changes that have occurred, over the last two decades, in the methodologies used to empirically examine for relationships between exports and economic growth, and we provide information on the current findings. The last decade has seen an abundance of time series studies which focus on examining for causality via exclusions restrictions tests, impulse response function analysis and forecast error variance decompositions. Our second contribution is to examine some of these time series methods. We show that ELG results based on standard causality techniques are not tyically robust to specification or method. We do this by reconsidering two export-led growth applications - Oxley's 1993 study for Portugal and Henriques and Sadorsky's 1996 analysis for Canada. Our results suggest that extreme care should be exercised when interpreting much of the applied research on the ELG hypothesis.

Keywords: Economic growth; export production; causality; time series models; misspecification; model dimension; cointegration; innovation accounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F43 O11 O51 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 78 pages
Date: 1999-01-12
Note: ISSN 1485-6441
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/_asse ... ometrics/ewp9901.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vic:vicewp:9901

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Econometrics Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Victoria PO Box 1700, STN CSC, Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 2Y2. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kali Moon (econdept@uvic.ca).