Policy, Institutions and Non-Oil Exports: Evidence from Nigeria

In this paper, the impact of policy and institutions on non-oil exports in Nigeria is investigated, using data from secondary sources for the period 1961-2012, and implemented through the autoregressive distributed lag framework. Non-oil exports were found to have a long-run equilibrium relationship with policy and institutional variables. Money supply and exchange rate were found to be positively associated with and statistically significant determinants of non-oil exports in the long and short run. Fiscal deficit, interest rate, ‘constraints on the executive’ and openness were found to be inversely related to non-oil exports in both the short and long run. While inflation was found to be negatively related to non-oil exports in the short run, it is the reverse in the long run. An enhanced political institutional framework is required, that is attuned to growth in the non-oil sector of the economy, as a mechanism for improving the country’s non-oil exports.