Energy consumption and agricultural economic growth in Pakistan: is there a nexus?

Purpose This study aims to empirically examine the relationship between energy consumption and agricultural economic growth in Pakistan over the period from 1984 to 2016. Design/methodology/approach This study used the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration to investigate the long-run and short-run determinants of agricultural economic growth in Pakistan. Findings The results of the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration revealed that long-run linkage exists among the study variables. The findings of this paper showed that agricultural economic growth is positively affected by gas consumption and electricity consumption both in the long-run and short run. The long-run and short-run coefficients of gas consumption and electricity consumption were estimated to be 0.906, 0.421, 0.595 and 0.276, respectively. The estimated equation remains stable during the period from 1984 to 2016 as analyzed by the stability tests. Originality/value This study considers the relationship between energy consumption and agricultural economic growth in Pakistan by using an ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration. The study has three contributions to economic literature:this study used different unit root tests to test stationarity of the variables such as ADF unit root test by Dicky and Fuller and P-P unit root test by Philip and Perron; the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration is applied to test the existence of long-run analysis between energy consumption and agricultural economic growth; and to check the robustness, the authors used the Johansen cointegration test to examine the long-run relationship between dependent and independent variables.