Industrial Development and Economic Growth Nexus in Nigeria

Purpose. Industrial development is crucial in converting all resources to humanity’s use and benefits. Economists observe that the development and utilisation of the industrial sector are essential in a country’s economic growth. Disaggregating the industrial sector into various components, this paper empirically analyses the performance of the industrial sector on economic growth in Nigeria over the 1970-2015 period. Hence, to evaluate the relationship between industrial development and economic growth in Nigeria. Design/Methodology. The paper adopted autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) as the technique of data analysis. Findings and implications. The results further revealed that the coefficients of all industrial subsectors, such as manufacturing, solid minerals and crude petroleum and gas, have positive and statistically significant influences on economic growth in both the short and long run. Among the industrial subsectors, the crude petroleum and gas sector appears to be the highest driver of Nigerian economic growth compared to other industrial subsectors, showing that the Nigerian economy is still far from diversified. Limitations. Limitation emanates from the problem of missing data from the source of data on the variable labour. However, effort has been made to overcome this challenge by applying a two-year moving average gap for periods of missing data. This method conforms to the rational expectation hypothesis (Muth, 1961). Originality. The development of the industrial sector of any economy can be measured by the contribution of various components (Isiksal & Chimezie, 2016). It is expected that as an economy becomes transformed, the share of industrialisation should be increasing (UNECA, 2011). The examination of industrial sector performance involves its sectoral components.