Impact of Agricultural Export on Inclusive Growth in Nigeria

The importance of the agricultural sector cannot be over emphasized as agriculture does not only serve the purpose of meeting a country’s food needs but also serves as a source of revenue. Before the discovery of crude oil, Nigeria was the largest net exporter of agriculture product being a major source of government revenue at the time. However, successive administration’s neglect of the sector and failure to diversify the economy have inhibited broad-based growth. This paper therefore examined the impact of agricultural export on inclusive growth (measured by per capita income) in Nigeria from 1981-2014 utilizing the Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) estimation technique proposed by Stock and Watson (1993). This approach accounts for present and past effects of agricultural export on inclusive growth. The results of the paper reveal that agriculture export, gross fixed capital formation, real interest rate and government total expenditure had positive effect on per capita income (measure of inclusive growth). However, the size of the impact of agriculture export was relatively small, indicating that more needs to be done to make agriculture impact meaningful in the economy. From the findings, the study recommend suitable policy to boost agricultural output which would invariably increase agricultural export commodities leading to an increase in revenue generation which trickles down to inclusive growth.