Export-led growth and the US economy: some further testing

Abstract

The export-led growth hypothesis is tested using quarterly time series data for the US economy using the Granger no-causality procedure, developed by Toda and Yamamoto (Journal of Economics, 66, 1995), in a six-variable vector autoregression (VAR) model. Moreover, we follow Riezman, Whiteman and Summers (Empirical Economics, 21, 1996) to test the export-led growth hypothesis while controlling for the growth of imports to avoid producing a spurious causality result; and finally, the empirical results are tested for the robustness using different lag structures. The findings in the paper indicate a two-way Granger causality between output and exports, a result from earlier export-growth studies on the US economy.