Impact of FDI and Electricity on the Economic Growth of Pakistan: A Long Run Cointegration and Causality Analysis

Since the 1980s, analysts have been debating the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) and electricity consumption (EC) on the economic growth (GDP) of developing countries. The purpose of the study is to estimate the long-run relationship between FDI, electricity consumption and GDP of Pakistan for the period of 1971 to 2017, using ARDL bounds testing, FMOLS and Canonicals cointegration regression. For causality analysis, the study uses a VECM approach for short-run causality directions and MWALD/Toda Yamamoto approach for the long-run causality directions. The cointegration results of all the approaches state that there exists a positive and significant long-run relationship between the concerned variables. The impact of electricity consumption on economic growth is very strong as compared to FDI. Moreover, in the short-run, there is a unidirectional causality running from FDI to GDP and GDP to EC. In the long-run causality, the study finds unidirectional causality for FDI and bidirectional causality for EC with GDP.