Does the twin growth catalyst of oil rent seeking and agriculture exhibit complementary or substitute role? New perspective from a West African country

Abstract

Over the last 3 decades, oil rent seeking has emerged to be a key driver of most economies around the globe. Prior to the oil boom, agriculture remain main stay of most economies especially developing economies. This present study seeks to revisit the contribution of both oil and agriculture sector in Nigeria by augmenting the neoclassical growth model by the inclusion of agriculture and oil rent as growth drivers. To do this, recent time series data from 1990 to 2017 is employed. This study adopts the use of contemporary econometrics test to investigate the theme holistically. First, stationarity test was conducted with a battery of both stationarity and unit root tests. Subsequently, Pesaran's auto regressive distributed lag bounds testing traces long-run equilibrium relationship between agriculture, oil rent, capital, labor and economic growth over the sampled period. Empirical piece of results validate the agriculture induced economic growth hypothesis, which aligns with the physiocracy school of thoughts ideology. This is against previous study; the resource curse hypothesis was not validated for this current study. Our study results show statistical significant relationship in both long- and short-run between oil rent and economic growth. These outcomes are quite revealing for decision makers and stakeholders since both sector contributes to economic growth. Based on these results, policy mix strategies were suggested in the course of the main text. Among such policies are reinforcing government and private sector participation in both sector given they show complementary role and not substitute to economic output.