What Affects Crop Production in Pakistan: The Role of Agriculture Employment, Machinery and Fertilizer Consumption

Labor abundant or under developing economies normally rely on their agriculture sector. The performance of agriculture sector depends on the production of cropping, livestock, fishery, and forestry sectors. The contribution of both cropping and livestock sectors in the agriculture production is almost 96.42 percent while the cropping sector contributes almost 33.85 percent during the fiscal year 20-2021 [Pakistan Economic Survey, 2020-2021]. The focus of this study is to investigate the factors which may influence the performance of crop production in Pakistan. For this purpose, bounds testing approach for the sample period from 1976 to 2022 is considered. The empirical results reveal that employment in agriculture sector, agriculture machinery, fertilizer consumption and urban population significantly boost the pace of crop production while the role of raw material imports is witnessed to be insignificant. The above reported results proposes that utilization of latest agriculture machinery, advanced fertilizers and high employability in agriculture sector may be encouraged to uplift the share of cropping sector in agriculture production in Pakistan.