Sectoral Linkages; Identifying the Key Growth Stimulating Sector of the Pakistan Economy

This paper investigates growth linkages among agriculture, industry and different segments of the service sector with a view to identifying the main growth stimulating sector with the highest level of backward and forward linkages in the economy. Time series data is used for the period 1971 to 2002. We estimate growth linkages through OLS regression analysis, also the Granger causality test is used to determine the direction of causality between growth of the different sectors of the economy for Pakistan. Our results suggest that the industrial sector plays an important role in determining the overall growth rate of the economy. The industrial GDP growth rate and service sector GDP growth rate both cause the growth rate of agricultural GDP. This verifies the neoclassical arguments that the higher productivity techniques in industry, (particularly in manufacturing) tend to spill over to agriculture, so encouraging convergent tendencies in sectoral productivity levels.