EXPORTS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN BANGLADESH: Has Manufacturing Exports Become a New Engine of Export-Led Growth?

This article empirically verifies the export-led growth hypothesis for Bangladesh and examines whether manufacturing exports have become a new engine of the export-led growth in Bangladesh, replacing the total exports-engine, as claimed by the so called de novo hypothesis. The empirical assessment based on the vector error correction modeling (VECM) that uses quarterly data over the period 1974–1999 suggests that both total exports and manufacturing exports have had positive and statistically significant impacts both in the long run and the short run. But an encompassing test in conjunction with the various non-nested tests suggests that total exports, as opposed to manufacturing exports in isolation, is the dominant engine of the export-led growth. This refutes the claim that manufacturing exports has become the sole determinant of the export-led growth in Bangladesh.