CENTRAL BANK INTERVENTION FUND AND AGRICULTURAL OUTPUT IN NIGERIA: AN ARDL APPROACH

This paper examines the impact of central bank financial intervention funds on Nigeria's agricultural exports from 1990 to 2020 with the specific objective of determining the extent to which the funds are financed by the Agricultural Credit Guarantee Fund (ACGSF) in the agricultural sector concerned. Agricultural exports both short-term and long-term during the period were under review. The study uses annual time data obtained from the CBN and WDI database. The Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique and the ARDL Bound test were used to determine the short-term and long-term relationships of the variables. The results show that ACGSF shows a positive and significant relationship of agricultural export growth in the short run with coefficients of 0.23, 0.33 and 0.19, but a negative and insignificant relationship of agricultural export in the long run. The analysis also shows a positive and insignificance of employment in agriculture in relation to agricultural production in the short term, while negative and significant in the long term. The 68.3% of the change in the dependent variable, as revealed by the adjusted R2, is due to the combined effect of the independent variables. The study therefore seeks for greater and appropriate funding of the government scheme or monetary authority to have a positive impact on long-term agricultural exports in Nigeria and should ensure immediate repayment of loan(s) to the qualified farmer to avoid diversion, political influence and delay in poor implementation process due to bank deposits of money in the country.