Sectoral Exports and Economic Growth Performance: Evidence from Nigeria

The paper seeks to investigate the contribution of key sectoral exports namely; Agricultural, Manufacturing and Services to the growth of Nigeria’s economy using annual data from 1980 to 2021. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was employed to estimate the long and short run relationships. The result proved that the Agricultural exports do not contribute to growth of Nigeria’s economy, thus the category of the primary exports from Nigeria may not be important in achieving economic growth of the country as compared to the Manufacturing and Service sectors which indicated a positive relationship in terms of contribution to growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The study, however, suggests that; the Agricultural/primary Sector which provides food and raw materials could be more beneficial to the economy if utilized domestically to produce finished or semi-finished products for consequent exports; thus, government should provide more priority to infrastructural development to boost the development of the Manufacturing and Service Sectors. The Service Sector, if harnessed could have the potential of significantly generating foreign exchange earnings for the country through exported services to other countries and the development of domestic micro services companies.