Trade Policy and Sustainable Human Development in Nigeria

Abstract

This study was basically carried out to assess the impact of trade policy and sustainable human development in Nigeria. Dynamic Auto-regressive distributive lag model (ARDL) was used to analyse the data from 1981 to 2020. Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) and Philip Peron (PP) unit root test results showed that all the variables were stationary at the first difference and the Bound test confirmed a long-run relationship among the variables. The ARDL results show the trade variables which are export (EXP), import (IMP), and trade openness (TROP) also exhibited some level of changes which in line with Nigeria's peculiarity. Also, the long-run scenario though positive is insignificant and has much to say about the current trade policies which are undermining the country's local output and reducing income per capita from the perspective of the firm's revenue due to falling demand and income of workers due to unemployment. The findings show that the short-run import (LIMP) has a negative impact on human development (LHDI) in Nigeria and this impact is statistically significant at the significance level of 0.05. The study, therefore recommended that Nigeria's trade policy should be designed within the general context of sustainable human development objectives and goals among others.