Understanding Agricultural Productivity Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Analysis of the Nigerian Economy

In recent times, agricultural sector has returned to the forefront of development issues in Nigeria given its contribution to employment creation, sustainable food supply and provision of raw materials to other sectors of the economy. In lieu of that, this study examines the impact of agriculture on the economic growth in Nigeria using annual time series data covering the sample period of 1981 to 2018. To analyse the data collected, Autoregression Distributed Lag (ARDL) model through the bounds testing framework is employed to measure the presence of cointegrating relations between real GDP, agricultural productivity, labour force, and agricultural export. Results show the presence of both short-run and long-run relationship among the variables, and that agriculture has a positive and significant impact on economic growth in Nigeria. These findings inform the Nigerian government on the need to expedite labour force (human capital) and agricultural export (non-oil) development with the view to achieving sustainable growth and development. In addition, developing skills and competencies of labour force through capacity building in the agricultural sector will encourage research and development thereby increase the export size, hence essential for long-term growth.