The Role of Urbanisation in the Economic Development Process: Evidence from Nigeria

The aim of this article is to investigate the relationship between urbanisation and economic growth, while controlling for the agricultural sector, industrial development and government expenditure in Nigeria. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration is applied to examine the long-run relationship between the variables over the period 1961–2012. In the process of estimating the long-run coefficients, the ARDL method is augmented with a fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) estimator and a dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) estimator. The direction of causality between the variables is examined through the vector error correction method (VECM) Granger causality test. The results establish the existence of a long-run relationship in the variables. The results of the long-run regressions indicate the presence of long-run causality from urbanisation, agriculture and industrialisation to economic growth. Due to the deficiencies associated with the single-equation methods (including the ARDL model), we also use the structural vector error correction model (SVECM) to analyse the relationship between the variables. The impulse response and variance decomposition analyses derived from the SVECM method suggest that urbanisation, agriculture and industrialisation are important determinants of economic growth. The implications of the results are discussed. JEL Classification: Q43, O55, O18