An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship Between Agricultural Productivity and Economic Development for Turkey

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate the link between agricultural productivity and economic growth primarily for a group of developed-developing countries and later for Turkey from 1991 to 2017. In the literature, there is abundant evidence for the correlation between these variables, but no consensus regarding the causal direction between the two variables and even regarding the sign of the relationship. In this paper, we aim to employ economies – both developed and developing – with the highest arable land (as a share of land area) in order to identify the relationship for the countries that focuses and/or dependent on the agricultural sector as an economic policy. Agricultural value added per worker and GDP per capita growth data are utilized to indicate the direction of causality – using Granger causality – and panel regression model is employed for all countries. Preliminary empirical findings provide distinct results for short long run different country groups and hence the agricultural policy recommendations for Turkey should be determined according to the country group that it participates.

Keywords: Economic Development, Agricultural Productivity, Empirical Studies of Economic Growth, Granger Causality

JEL Classification: O13, O47, Q1, Q19