Economic Globalization and Nigeria’s Development: Letting the Facts Speak

Abstract

The rationale for globalization was that opening up of economies to each other through world trade, financial and technological diffusion would ultimately make all the nations better off. Nigeria has been committed to globalization in very elaborate contexts, and one evidence of this is her signing of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements to engage in trade according to their standards. This chapter examines trade liberalization statistics and Nigeria’s key economic indicators after decades of embracing globalization. The chapter has obtained data from WTO and World Bank (WB) databases and Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin. Descriptive tools and stylized facts were employed on the data. Applying the Auto-Regressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) technique, the chapter examines the relationship between globalization and development. The results show that globalization has not led to economic development in Nigeria in spite of the evidence that tariffs have been lower, the economy has become more open, and the volume of trade has increased. The stylized facts show that Nigerians have not been made better off by the opening up of the economy; indexes have worsened in some cases. The chapter recommends that the dynamics of globalization as embraced in the country be re-examined and deliberately refocused so that future engagements proceed in a manner that will target improvements in the development indicators.