**3.6 Conclusion**

Attaining high and sustainable economic growth is a major policy objective for any country especially among developing countries. In this paper, we examined the macroeconomic determinants of economic growth in Uganda using the factor accumulation framework for the period 1982–2015.

The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to co-integration was used to estimate both the short- and long-run elasticities of the selected macroeconomic determinants. The ARDL bounds testing approach to co-integration in the benchmark regression indicated that the key determinants that are positively associated with growth in GDP in the short run are the initial level of real GDP growth, government consumption and investment, while foreign aid, inflation and a dummy for SAPs were negatively and significantly associated with real GDP growth. The results failed to show that trade openness, population growth and human capital accumulation were significantly associated with real GDP growth in the short run [95–98].

The study revealed that in the long run, trade openness, population growth and government consumption and investment were positively and significantly associated with GDP growth, while the policy dummy on SAPs was negatively and significantly associated with GDP. In the long run, the study failed to show that inflation, human capital and foreign aid were significantly associated with GDP growth. It can be concluded that in the short run, policy variables contributed to economic growth more than factor accumulation (physical and human capital), while in the long run, a mixture of both factor accumulation and policy variables was the major driver of economic growth.

The study results have significant policy implications for Uganda. They show that investment and population have are significantly associated with economic growth both in the short and long run. Thus, it is recommended that the economic strategies to be adopted should include those that create incentives to attract investment—with an emphasis on the adoption of labour–intensive technologies, on quality–based human capital development. In the short run trade openness, government consumption, foreign aid and inflation are positively and significantly associated with economic growth meaning that the country should pursue policies that enhance trade, government effectiveness, aid effectiveness and economic management.

The study found that the key determinants that were positively associated with growth in GDP in the short run were the initial level of GDP growth, government consumption, investment and a dummy for SAPs, while foreign aid and inflation were negatively associated with GDP growth. The results failed to show that trade openness, population growth and human capital accumulation were significantly associated with GDP growth in the short run. In the long run, the study revealed that trade openness, population growth, government consumption and investment were positively associated with GDP, while the policy dummy on SAPs was negatively associated with GDP growth. In the long run, the study failed to show that inflation, human capital and foreign aid were significantly associated with growth in GDP.

These results have significant policy implications for Uganda, both in the short and long run. In the short run it is recommended that economic strategies that would spur accumulation of physical capital/Investment**,** increase government consumption, improve price stability be pursued while in the long run, strategies that improve trade openness, population growth, government consumption and investment should be pursued.
