The Determinants of Pakistan’s Trade Balance: An ARDL Cointegration Approach

This article is an attempt to examine the short and long-run relationship between the trade balance, income, money supply, and real exchange rate in the case of Pakistan’s economy. Income and money variables are included in the model in order to examine the monetary and absorption approaches to the balance of payments, while the real exchange rate is used to evaluate the conventional approach of elasticities (Marshall Lerner condition). The bounds testing approach to cointegration and error correction models, developed within an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework is applied to annual data for the period 1970 to 2005 in order to investigate whether a long-run equilibrium relationship exists between the trade balance and its determinants. Additionally, variance decompositions (VDCs) and impulse response functions (IRFs) are used to draw further inferences. The result of the bounds test indicates that there is a stable long-run relationship between the trade balance and income, money supply, and exchange rate variables. The estimated results show that exchange rate depreciation is positively related to the trade balance in the long and short run, consistent with the Marshall Lerner condition. The results provide strong evidence that money supply and income play a strong role in determining the behavior of the trade balance. The exchange rate regime can help improve the trade balance but will have a weaker influence than growth and monetary policy.