Trade Openness And Poverty: An Empirical Study of Nigeria’s Economy

This study investigated the relationship between trade openness and poverty rate in Nigeria using quarterly time series data spanning from 1986Q1 to 2019Q4. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimating technique was employed to determine the short-run and the long-run relationship among the variables. The study found that trade openness is positively and significantly related to poverty rate both in the short run and long run. Also inflation rate has a negative and significant impact on poverty rate only in the short run. Gross domestic product per capita growth rate was also found to be negatively and significantly related to poverty rate. The study recommended that government should eliminate the factors that inhibit the gains of trade in Nigeria such as building a strong institutional base of which eradication of corruption is a viable tool. Secondly, inflation rate should be stabilized to avoid further increase of the poverty rate in the economy.