Do Agricultural Input Resources Contribute to Economic Growth in China? A Dynamic ARDL Simulation Approach Authors Information

Meseret Chanie Abate^1*Baozhong Cai¹Tesfay Albert²Asrat Ayele Woldemariam³Rong Zeng¹Amsalu K. Addis^4*Wenjin Long⁵Melkamu Kassay Mekonen⁶

• ¹Hunan University of Science and Engineering, Hunan, China
• ²University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, United States
• ³East China Normal University, Shanghai, Shanghai Municipality, China
• ⁴Hanjiang Normal University, Shiyan, China
• ⁵China Agricultural University, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
• ⁶Injibara University, Injibara, Amhara Region, Ethiopia

While sustainable agricultural inputs are crucial for ensuring food security, fostering economic development, enhancing livelihoods, and building resilience in rapidly emerging economies, there is a notable lack of research utilizing the advanced dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (DYARDL) approach to examine their relationship with agriculture-driven economic growth. This study aims to fill this critical gap by employing the DYARDL simulation model to rigorously investigate this relationship, utilizing annual time series data spanning from 1983 to 2023. The result revealed that the unit root tests confirm that all variables are stationary, and the ARDL bounds test identifies a long-run cointegrating relationship among the variables examined. The findings indicate that the expansion of irrigated areas and increased chemical fertilizer usage significantly contribute to agricultural economic growth in both the short and long run, while agricultural mechanization enhances growth only in the short run. The effect of crop-sown land on agricultural economic growth is not statistically significant in either the short or long run. The 10% positive and negative shocks in novel DYARDL simulations forecast validate both the long-run and short-run analysis results. This study provides insights into how the dynamics in critical input resources affect the agricultural economy and can be useful for informing strategies to build resilient, low-input systems for global food security and agro-environmental sustainability.