Economic Growth Impact of Technology and Trade in Nigeria

Trade generally has been linked to high economic growth and technology diffusion across and within economies. This study thus sets out to investigate, in the context of Nigeria, the economic growth impacts of technology and trade using three proxies of trade openness- the ratio of total exports and imports to the gross domestic product (GDP); the total volume of exports; and imports. Fixed telephone plus mobile cellular subscriptions were used as a proxy for technology. With data extracted from the World Development Indicators, three models were estimated using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework for cointegration and determination of long-run coefficients of parameters. Granger causality tests were performed to determine the direction of causalities. The results of all the tests were interpreted to arrive at the inferences and conclusions drawn for this work. Trade openness and exports were found to be detrimental to growth, while the positive impact of imports was not significant. Technology was found to significantly promote growth and Granger caused exports, imports, capital, and labor. All the diagnostics supported the validity of the assumptions of the regression errors and the specification of our models. We concluded that the growth impact of trade on Nigeria's economy is largely dependent on the technology intensity of its trade.