Export - led growth or growth – driven exports? Evidence from Nigeria

This paper examined the role of export in the economic growth process in Nigeria. Time series data ranging from 1970 to 2009 was used and the study employs unit root testing, co-integration analysis and VAR Granger Causality/Exogeneity Wald Tests to analyze annual time series data from Nigeria. The study uses three measures of export namely, Total export, Oil export and Non-Oil export. This enhances the stability and robustness of results. The unit root test showed that both economic growth and export are integrated of order one, i.e. 1(1). The cointegration test confirmed for model 1 and model 2 (where total exports and oil exports are used respectively as proxy for Nigeria exports) that economic growth and export are cointegrated, indicating an existence of long run equilibrium relationship between the two as confirmed by the Johansen cointegration test results. However, there is no evidence of cointegration between export and economic growth for model 3. Granger causality was applied to test the causal relationship between GDP and economic growth. The results show that there is evidence of uni-directional causality between export and economic growth in Nigeria in three measures of exports and the direction of causality runs strictly from economic growth to exports. This study provided support for growth-led export in case of Nigeria. Thus effort should be direct towards policies that will enhance economic growth such as import substitution industrialization (ISI) strategy, in order to impact more on exports