Is public investment complementary to private investment in Indian agriculture? Evidence from NARDL approach

The issue of complementarity between public farm investment and private farm investment in Indian agriculture is an unsettled empirical question in the literature, which has not been studied adequately. Few studies analyzing the trends of both types of investments have produced contradictory results. Thus, this study attempts to bridge that gap, by examining the hypothesis of crowding-in/crowding-out effect of public sector investment on private investment. Time series data for a period of 45 years from 1971 to 2015 has been used. Adopting a 'nonlinear auto-regressive distributive lag' (NARDL) model the study confirms a strong crowding-in effect of public investment on private investment in short run, but relatively a weak complementarity between the two over long-run. Moreover, the public canal intensity as a major component of public investment has been observed to have much stronger effect on private investment than the public investment itself. It is also found that private investment is constrained by its own lagged values, institutional credit and terms of trade during both short-run and long-run. The policy suggestion of this study calls for an immediate arrest of declining trend of public investment.