Investigating Post Economic Reforms Determinants of Agriculture Growth in India by using ARDL Approach.

The agriculture sector plays a very important role in the generation of income, output and employment in any developing economy including India. In India, the share of agriculture GDP has depicted a declining trend over a long period of time particularly after the year 1991. During the post-economic reform period, the share of agriculture sector in the country's GDP declined from 28.5 per cent in 1991 to 17.8 per cent in 2020. Moreover, India's agriculture sector's annual average growth rate was only 3.17 per cent during the post-economic reform period. In the given scenario, this paper investigates the major factors determining the sector's performance based on Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The ARDL based Bound test revealed the existence of a long-run relationship among selected variables in the model. Moreover, the error correction term's coefficient indicates that the short-run shocks could be adjusted towards their long-run equilibrium at a faster rate: 83 per cent per annum. The estimated results of the study demonstrated that certified seeds, fertilizer consumption, net irrigated area, and pesticide use have significantly and positively affected the Agricultural GDP in the long run. However, in the short run only two variables viz. certified seeds and pesticide have significantly affected the agricultural GDP. Statistical diagnosis represents stability in the model, and there is no serial correlation as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]