2012.export Economic Growth
2012.export Economic Growth
2012.export Economic Growth
1. Introduction
Recently, a central role of foreign trade policy for economic growth has
been gained a great attention of economic researches for developing and
developed countries. Foreign trade has been accepted as an increasingly large
role in the growth of world economy since A. Smiths traditional economic
theory, and an even larger role in developing and emerging economies.
Trade leads to growth by specialization in production. And specialization
of countrys abundant production factor also enable country to trade more
costly goods from the rest of the world and boost welfare. Integration to
the world economies also helps country to change its technological capacity
through more advanced countries technology transfer. Also by increasing
trade also restricts monopoly power in country and holds prices down for
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Therefore, for the failures of the IS strategy listed above, counties transformed to the structure of trade policies into export-led growth (ELP) strategy. ELG strategy recommends countries to prepare economic structure for
export oriented production. ELP model is an economic policy aiming to
develop industries that a country has a comparative advantage in the export
goods.
According to mainstream literature, the potential benefits associated with
the ELG strategy with respect to IS is as follows (Felipe, 2010: 263):
(i) the domestic resource cost of earning a unit of foreign exchange tends to
be less than the domestic resource cost of saving a unit of foreign exchange;
(ii) as the ELG rests on exogenous world demand, a developing economy
can overcome diseconomies of small size. And in general, technologyeconomic factors (e.g., minimum efficient size of plant, increasing returns
to scale, indivisibilities in the production process) imply a superiority of
development through export promotion;
(iii) for being exposed to world competition, firms in the country can
increase X-efficiency (i.e., the forces that intensify motivation that result
in lower cost curves for the firm);
(iv) a protrade strategy may attract foreign direct investment;
(v) ELG contributes more than does IS to employment creation and improvement in the distribution of income; and
(vi) a higher rate of growth of exports is associated with a high growth.
Transformation from import substitution strategy to export lead trade increases the efficiency and advantages in production by revaluation and
transfer of technology.
However, export-led growth has also some problem and drawbacks
affected world economies. The main problem of export-led growth is proposed by a standard Keynesian theory. According to Keynes, demand
determined equilibrium, and maintains that the level of economic activity
adjusts to equal the level of aggregate demand. Within a Keynesian framework, export-led policy suffers from an inherent fallacy of composition
whereby one countrys attempts to boost domestic aggregate demand by
increasing exports results in a reduction of domestic aggregate demand in
the country it is exporting to (Palley, 2003: 178).
Second weakness of ELG is that the relation between economic growth
and development of domestic markets is blocked. The more dependent
foreign demand leads less developed countries to lose their rivalries situation
and so makes countries fragile to instabilities of world economy. The ELG
strategy is also blamed for mainly contributed to the Asian financial crisis,
19971998. During the crisis countries such as Korea, Thailand, Indonesia
and the Philippines very much affected (Thesen, 2007: 58).
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Graph 1 shows the data covering 2002 and 2011 years belonging to the
exports and GDP of Turkey which are obtained from Turkish Statistical
Institute and are displayed in Graph 1. That export and GDP run parallel in
some period can be seen from the graph. Therefore, the purpose of the
present study is to find the direction of causality between exports and GDP.
To that and, we have carried out a Granger Causality Test on the data
displayed in Graph 1 and present and discuss the results below.
2. Literature Review
The determiner role of export in economic growth has been argued in
many theories. For classical economic theory, trade blocks such as tariffs and
quotas should be removed and liberal policies of trade should be implemented.
Because, international trade leads countries to obtain economic gain from
division of labor and specialization and it plays an important role in economic
growth.
The neo-classical theory, also favor trade activities and economic growth
gain of countries by introducing demand side of international trade, the
relationship between factor allocation, income distribution and international
trade.
The new or endogenous growth theory which is a view of the economy
that incorporates important point, technology can be transferred internationally
through trade and imitated by late-coming countries. The imitation of technology has two opposing effects on the incentives of innovating firms in
developed countries.
Besides core economic theories, the nexus between export and economic
growth have been popular subjects both theoretically and empirically in
international economics area. Several studies have been detected this relation
by time series and cross section analysis.
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While some of the studies tested the export-growth relation supports the
export-led growth hypothesis, the others doesnt conclude the validity of
the hypothesis. Michaely (1977), Balassa (1978), Krueger (1978), Chenery
(1979), Tyler (1981), Kavoussi (1984), Ram (1985), Chow (1987), Fosu
(1990), Salvatore and Hatcher (1991), Crospo and Wrz (2003) are the
studies about this subject were the results support the export growth hypothesis (Anwer and Sampath, 1997: 3). Jung and Marshall (1985) Darrat (1986),
Xu (1996) Colombatto (1990), Ahmad and Kwan (1991) Afxentiou and
Serletis (1991), Bahmani-Oskooee et al. (1991), Ahmed et al. (2000) are
studies that all reject the export-led growth hypothesis (Anwer and Sampath, 1997:3). Studies analyzing the relationship between exports and
economic growth in Turkey found also different result. Rodrik (1995) studies
four countries (Korea, Taiwan, Chile and Turkey) and presents very briefly
Granger causality tests between the share of investment in GDP and the
share of exports plus imports in GDP. No causality could be detected for
either direction in Turkey. Yigidim and Kose (1997) studied variables for
the years 19801996 and found no causality between export and growth
but when they use variables in logarithmic form of first differences has
identified unidirectional causality.
Ozmen and Furtun (1997) tested the export-led growth for the years of
19701995 in Turkey by using time series and concluded the long-term
co-integration between the two variables is significant. Ozmen et al. (1999)
used the quarterly data during the period 1983:11997:2. They have tested
the causality issue between export and output by applying the standard
Granger (1969) causality method. The results show unidirectional causality
from export to output under the consideration period. Simsek (2003) found
in his study bi-directional causality running from growth to export but
rejected export-led growth hypothesis. Alici and Ucal (2003) employed Toda
and Yamamoto (1995) causality technique to test the hypothesis using
quarterly data 1987:12002:4. The results indicate uni-directional causality
running from export growth to output growth. Demirhan (2005) analyzed
the relationship between export and growth for the years of 19872004 and
he detected the result of the long-term relationship. Taban and Aktar (2005)
concluded that the existence of uni-directional causality between two variables
for the years of 19802003 but no sign of long-term relation. Demirhan
and Akcay (2005) made the study of the relationship between export and
growth. They found granger causality running from economic growth to
export growth. Karagl and Serel (2005) found bi-directional causality relation
running from GDP to export for the period of 19552002. Halcoglu (2007)
seeks to validity of the export-led growth hypothesis using quarterly data
from 1980 to 2005 and found suggest unidirectional causation from exports
to industrial production. Taban and Aktar (2008) found that the existence of
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The Table 1 above shows that two variables were not stationary in levels.
This can be seen by comparing the observed values (in absolute terms) of
the test statistics with the critical values (also in absolute terms) of the test
statistics at the 1%, 5% and 10% level of significance.
The results of the first differenced variables show that the ADF and PP
test statistics for two variables are greater than critical values at 1%, 5%,
10% levels and the two variables are stationary after differenced, suggesting that two variables are integrated of order I(1).
3.2. Co-integration Test
In this study, the maximum likelihood estimation method of Johansen and
Juselius (1990) is employed to test for cointegration. The maximum likelihood procedure of Johansen (1988) and Johansen and Juselius (1990)
method to cointegrated models provides an efficient procedure for the
estimation of cointegrated systems. The main advantage of the Johansen
Maximum Likelihood (ML) method is that it enables one to determine the
number of existing cointegrating (i.e. long-run) relationships among the
variables in hand (Utkulu, 1997: 43).
VAR and the corresponding VECM model is defined as follows:
Xt = c + x1Xt-1 +x2Xt-2 + xpXt-p + +t
(1)
where = Real GDP (Y) and export (X). And also, c is a constant term
(3x1 in our case), p = nxn matrices of autoregressive coefficients for i = 1,
2p, it must be presented a reparametrisation of equation (1) in order to
distinguish between stationary by linear combinations and differencing.
Thus the system equation in (1) can be rewritten as follows:
t = c + 1 t-1 + 2 t-2 + p-1 t-p+1 + t-p+
where i = -(I 1.i ) (i = 1, p-1) and = -(I 1 - - p)
(2)
(3)
Johansen maximum likelihood approach employing both maximum eigenvalue and trace statistic for VAR=1 can be seen in table-2. We note the
results of cointegration analysis obtained by the estimation (a) with the lag
length k=1. We recognize a single cointegrating vector for the system by
rejecting reject the null of no cointegration (r=0) but not the null of at most
one cointegrating vector (r=1) according to the maximal eigenvalue ( max)
and trace eigenvalue ( trace) statistics. The eigenvectors presented in
Table 2 are normalized by LY.
Table 2 Johansen and Juselius Cointegration Test
Series: LY, LX
r
Trace
Critical
Max-Eigen
Critical
Statistics
Value
Statistic
Value
5%
5%
r=0
23.89480(2)
20.26184 18.23742(2) 11.22480
r1
9.164546
9.686700 9.164546
9.686700
Normalized cointegration equation: LY = 0.966364 LX
** Denotes for 5% significance level.
Result
Cointegrated
The optimum lag-lengths are indicated within parentheses and they are
determined by the Schwarz criterion.
The aim of an impulse response function is to identify the effect of a
one-time shock to one of the innovations on current and future values of
the endogenous variables (Root and Lien, 2003). A shock to the i-th variable
not only directly affects the i-th variable but is also transmitted to all of the
other endogenous variables through the dynamic (lag) structure of the VAR.
Figure 1 Impulse response functions one standard deviation shock in LY
however from the rest of the years this shock negatively affects LY and
the effect of the shock is permanent.
Figure 2 Impulse response functions one standard deviation shock in LX
Figure 2 shows that the effects of one standard deviation shock given to the
GNP (LY) on export (LX). We can say that when one standard deviation
shock is given to the LY, this shock affect on LX four year negatively
however from the five year this shock positively affects LX and the effect
of the shock is permanent.
3.3 Granger Causality Tests
If the variables are cointegrated, a VECM should be estimated rather than
a VAR as in a standard Granger causality test Granger (1988). Therefore,
we estimate a VECM for the Granger causality test because we found a
cointegration relationship between export and GDP.
4
(5)
where LX and LY refer to export and GDP respectively.
As we showed the series to be cointegrated, there must be either unidirectional or bidirectional Granger causality, since at least one of the error
correction terms (ECT) is significantly nonzero by the definition of cointegration. First, by testing for all d yi equals 0 in equation (4) or for all
Wzi equals 0 in equation (5), we evaluate Granger weak causality. This can
be implemented using a Standard Wald test. Masih and Masih (1996) and
Asafu-Adjaye (2000) interpreted the weak Granger causality as short run
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causality in the sense that the dependent variable responds only to shortterm shocks to the stochastic environment.
The other possible causality is added the ECT in equation (4) and (5).
The coefficients on the ECT represent how fast deviations from the long run
equilibrium are eliminated following changes in each variable. In order to
test Granger causality, we will investigate whether the two sources of
causation are jointly significant. This can be done by testing the joint hypotheses that all d yi and 1(ECT) are jointly zero in equation (4) or all Wzi
and 2(ECT) are jointly zero (0) in equation (5). This is referred to as a
strong Granger causality test. The joint test indicates which variable(s)
bear the burden of short run adjustment to reestablish long run equilibrium,
following a shock to the system Asafu-Adjaye (2000).
Table 3 Granger Causality Tests
Dependent
Source of Causation (Independent Variable)
Variable
Short Run-Causality
Long Run-Causality
LY
LX
ECT/LY
ECT/LX
4.64**
----------------1.27**
LY
3.25**
LX
The appropriate lag lengths are chosen using Schwartzs Information Criteria (AIC).
* Denotes for 5% significance level.
** Denotes for 1% significance level.
As can be seen from the Table 3, F statistics, which are applied the lagged
coefficients of X and Y are all jointly significant at the 5% and 1%
levels, respectively. We conclude that there is a uni-directional short run
causal relationship between the variables from export to economic growth.
We cannot reject the null hypotheses that the coefficients on the ECTs and
the interaction terms are jointly zero in LY equation while we can reject the
null hypotheses that the coefficient on the ECT and the interaction terms
are jointly zero in the LX equation. The coefficients of the ECTs in the LX
equation are significant at the 1% level. So we found bi-directional longrun causality between export and GDP using Wald test.
In summary, Granger causality test results indicate that there is a
unidirectional causality relationship between export growth and real GDP
growth in short run and but bidirectional in the long run in Turkey for the
period 20022011.
4. Result
This paper examined the causal relationship between export and GDP for
Turkey over the period 20022011 using a bivariate model of GDP and
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