Did Diversification Impact Economic Growth in Nigeria in the Last 20 Years of Democratic Government (1999–2019)? A Vector Error Correction Model .

Diversification of the Nigerian economy from oil-based to other non-oil sectors has become a recurrent economic solution to the growing challenges associated with the Nigerian economy. For the past 20 years of uninterrupted democratic government in Nigeria, the successive federal governments have focused on the development of the agricultural sector as a credible option for diversification, partly for the past positive roles of the agricultural sector in the Nigerian economy before the discovery of oil. Using the multivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) model on the data obtained from 1999 to 2019, this study applied the vector error correction (VEC) model to determine the impacts of diversification of the Nigerian economy on economic growth, focusing on the manufacturing and the agricultural sectors. To determine the underlying impact of the democratic experience in Nigeria with diversification, we utilised the political rights of the population as a proxy variable. The empirical results showed that there exists cointegration among the variables used to represent the manufacturing and the agricultural sectors, political rights, and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate within the Nigerian economy. The manufacturing sector has a positive impact on the growth of the Nigerian economy; however, the agricultural sector and the political rights of the Nigerian people have adverse effects on the real GDP growth rate, in the short run. The Granger Causality tests found no evidence of causality among the variables. This study concludes that the diversification policy of the Nigerian government should be multi-faceted and that the political rights of the population are essential for the realisation of the diversification goal.