Exports and Economic Growth: The Arab Experience

This paper aims at analysing the relationship between exports and economic growth in the Arab countries using annual data for the period 1970-1999. Section two of this study presents a theoretical background of the relationship between exports and economic growth. Literature review is found in Section 3. In Section 4, the methodological issues of studying this relationship are discussed. Results of stationarity tests using Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and Phillips-Perron (PP) as well as Bivariate Johansen-Juseluis tests for cointegration are presented in Section 5. Stationarity tests suggest that time series are non-stationary in their levels and seem to be stationary in their first differences. Testing for long-run cointegration relationship using Johansen-Juseluis approach, it is found that in general there is no cointegration relationship between exports and GDP. For this reason, we abandoned the error correction model and tested for causality using different versions of Granger’s causality test. We found mixed results about the causal relationship between exports and GDP in Arab countries.