The principal question that this research addresses is the validity of the Export-Led Growth hypothesis (ELG) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the period 1981-2012, focusing on the causality between primary exports, manufactured exports and economic growth. Unit root tests are applied to examine the timeseries properties of the variables, while the Johansen cointegration test is performed to confirm or not the existence of a long-run relationship between the variables. Moreover, the multivariate Granger causality test and a modified version of Wald test are applied to examine the direction of the short-run and long-run causality respectively. The cointegration analysis reveals that manufactured exports contribute more to economic growth than primary exports in the long-run. In addition, this research provides evidence to support a bi-directional causality between manufactured exports and economic growth in the short-run, while the Growth-Led Exports (GLE) hypothesis is valid in the long-run for UAE.

This paper examines the validity of the export-led growth (ELG) hypothesis in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the period 1975-2012, using a neoclassical production function augmented with merchandise exports and imports of goods and services. The study applies the Johansen cointegration technique and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) regression to confirm the existence of a long-run relationship between exports and economic growth, while the multivariate Granger causality test is applied to examine the direction of the short-run causality. In addition, the existence of long-run causality is investigated by applying a modified version of the Wald test in an augmented vector autoregressive model. The Johansen test and DOLS results confirm the existence of a long-run relationship between exports and economic growth. In addition, the study provides evidence to support the validity of the ELG hypothesis in the short-run, while no long-run causality is found to exist.

A number of studies have identified the positive effect of exports on economic growth (export-led growth (ELG) hypothesis) through enhanced economies of scale, adoption of advanced technology and greater capacity utilization (Feder,