Nigerian Journal of Banking and Financial Issues (NJBFI)

AGRICULTURAL NON-OIL EXPORT AND INTERNATIONAL RESERVE ACCUMULATION IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The foreign reserve of Nigeria has been fluctuating with time largely due to over dependence in crude oil earning. So it was the need to diversify its export and income base of the country. In this paper, the investigation of the non-oil export of agriculture and foreign currency accretion of international reserves was carried out in Nigeria during the period 1986-2023. These data were culled from World Development Indicators and the annual bulletin of the Central Bank of Nigeria, 2023, whose analysis was carried out by the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL). In the results part, it was established that, agricultural export, trade balance and degree of openness had a positive and significant (Prob. < 0.05) effect on accumulation of the international reserves, exchange rate had an insignificant effects, and external debt had significant negative effect on accumulation of international reserves. The study recommended that the government should aim to put in the required input along with the required investment that can assist in enhancing further accumulation in the agricultural export so that it can pile up a reserve in the nation.