Trade composition and economic growth: evidence from Central Asian countries

The main objective of this research is to examine the impact of the composition of international trade on the economic growth of five Central Asian countries, namely, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, with the application of the Panel Autoregressive distributed lag model approach between 1995 and 2021. The empirical findings show that primary good exports have no impact on economic growth and primary good imports affect growth negatively. We find that manufacture exports, fuel exported commodities and capital imports have a positive impact on the GDP per capita. As a result, particular policy actions might be implemented to encourage an expansion of exports and imports in such sectors, which may be linked to higher economic growth outcomes and must be handled appropriately and individually. When the constraints on imports remain in effect, export promotion as a growth strategy will only have a limited impact.