The Agricultural Exports Impact on Economic Growth: The Case for the Swaziland Sugar Industry

• Main Authors: Dlamini, Sibonelo Nomvuselelo, 戴芯蘿
• Other Authors: SHIH, PEI-CYUAN
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/43903423407779307549

碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 國際企業學系碩士班 === 105 === The Swaziland sugar industry is the biggest contributor to the economy of Swaziland through tax revenues, social welfare and trade. The industry is now the ‘Swazi gold’; it plays a very important role in the economy by influencing economic growth and employment. Given the role of the Swaziland sugar industry, it is important to investigate the impact of agricultural exports on economic growth. The purpose of this paper is to examine what is the contribution of the two main market segments for the Swaziland sugar industry. The markets are the European Union (EU) and the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), since almost 90% of the sugar exports goes to them, through the preferential trade agreement they have. The data was obtained from the Swaziland Sugar Association Annual reports and the World Bank. The results indicated that Swaziland will export more to SACU because the distance is smaller than the other countries such as EU. Moreover, the population in EU has significant negative effect on to the Swaziland sugar exports to SACU. This implies an increase in EU’s population will decrease the export volume to SACU for Swaziland sugar industry. On the other hand, EU’s GDP has an ambiguous impact on the Swaziland sugar exports. The intuition behind this result is that sugar is a necessary good, not a luxury or high value-added products. If the population increases, then the demand for the sugar increases while the income (GDP) does not have the same effect.