Revisiting the effects of relevant factors on Pakistan's agricultural products export

Abstract

Pakistan is an agriculture-based country, so the agricultural sector is known as the backbone of the national economy. Considering the national economy and the agricultural industry, it is necessary to focus on earnings through agricultural products export to improve the livelihood of local farmers. Therefore, the current study aimed to analyse the short-term and long-term factors affecting agricultural products export. The annual time series of 1976–2016 were collected from World Bank indicators, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Statistical Bureau of Pakistan. An autoregressive distributed lag, along with a vector error correction model, was employed. A cointegration test showed long-term associations between the selected variables. While the autoregressive distributed lag model confirmed the short-term correlation between area sown and crop production towards agricultural products export, there is no long-term relationship between the selected variables. In addition, the bidirectional correlation between employment in agriculture and agricultural products export was confirmed by the vector error correction model. Therefore, it is essential to increase agricultural production with the available natural resources to increase foreign earnings.