This paper investigates the effect of oil rents on agriculture value added in oil producing Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. Annual data from 1970 to 2011, panel co-integration tests by Pedroni (1999), long ran panel causality tests by Canning and Pedroni (2008), and two-step System GMM by Blundell and Bond (1998) are used in this study. We find a negative relationship between oil rents and agriculture value added in the long run, with a rather slow rate of short run adjustment of agriculture value added back to equilibrium after a boom in oil rents. These results indicate that an oil sector boom is associated with a contraction in the agriculture sectors of the countries in the panel in the long run. This is probably attributable to a resource movement effect from other economic sectors to the booming oil sector in these countries. This serves as evidence of a Dutch disease effect of an oil sector boom on agriculture in the MENA countries in this study.
Human Sciences Research Council (Sat,) studied this question.