Agricultural Exports and Economic Growth: A Disaggregated Analysis for Ghana

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.