Export Trade and Economic Growth in Malawi: A Disaggregated Approach

This paper applies the Vector Autoregressive (VAR) technique to annual data from 1980 to 2013 to provide empirical evidence on the long-run relationship between export trade and economic growth in Malawi. The export trade in this study is disaggregated into services and goods exports. Thus, the paper estimated two models. The first model deals with the relationship between export of services and growth, and the other one determines the relationship between goods export and growth. While the paper finds no evidence for long-run relationship between export of services and goods on economic growth, the empirical results suggest existence of a short-run nexus between export of goods and economic growth in Malawi. The Granger causality test results have also confirmed existence of a unidirectional causality from goods exports to economic growth and another unidirectional causality from goods exports to service exports.