POLITICAL REGIMES AND ECONOMIC FLUCTUATIONS IN NIGERIA

This thesis tests the proposition that politicians are a potential source of economic fluctuations in Nigeria. As a result, underlying assumptions of existing political cycle theories are relaxed to test politically-determined cycles in a context where elections do not hold and where politicians’ ideology are neither left nor right but are influenced by other institutional features peculiar to Nigeria’s political structure. The results obtained from the study provide empirical support for the existence of political business cycles in Nigeria. In a novel manner, the study extends the political cycle literature by investigating the cyclical features of political cycles, using a dynamic factor model that extracts a one-step ahead political shock component. Result shows that shocks from political activities are only a small proportion of aggregate economic fluctuations in Nigeria