The Journal of Developing Areas

Most of the study of causal relationship of GDP or growth with Trade and Foreign Direct Investment in the context of India rely on cross country comparisons, or simple correlations/regressions disregarding nonstationarity properties, or at most on VAR or VECM or Johansen-Juselius cointegration technique of testing for Granger causality. The potential biases, pitfalls, influence of nuisance parameters and asymptotic unreliability of these techniques have been well documented in the literature and also briefly mentioned in this paper. Therefore, this paper employs the more recent and robust Toda-Yamamoto-Dolado-Lutkephol augmented VAR(p) technique for testing Granger causality among these three time series. This technique has been shown to provide more robust and asymptotically reliable results under wide variety of situations regarding the cointegration relationships among the time series. This study also focuses on the post liberalization period and clearly shows that the post- liberalization period significantly differs from the pre-liberalization period in the GDP-Export-FDI nexus. We find strong support for Export-led and Foreign Direct Investment led growth hypotheses only in the post liberalization period.