A Study Examining the Effect of Pistachio Export in Iran

Pistachio is one of the most important agricultural sector products in Iran. This product is important because of creating exchange, employment, value added and other economic conditions. The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between pistachio export and economic growth in Iran. The theoretical framework was designed based on this assumption that the total production in the economy is divided into two sections: production for inside and production for export. The data were collected from 1990 to 2003 and were analyzed using Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. The result of the analyses showed that there was significant relationship between pistachio export and economic growth. Together the independent variables explained 89% of the variance in the dependent variables. The remaining 11% was due to unidentified variables. In relation to that, we can conclude that explanatory power is high for the equation. It showed that one percent change in pistachio export rate lead to 38% in economic growth. Therefore pistachio export is regarded as an important factor in Iran's economic growth.