Benefits of Nigeria’s Participation in the African Growth and Opportunity Act

Abstract

Abstract With a view to understand the benefits of Nigeria’s participation in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) this paper examines US–Nigeria’s trade relations between 2001 and 2022. The paper argues that the lofty provisions of AGOA are laudable, even though unworkable, and given the environments within which the provisions of the trade policy were drafted and enacted, the subscription was carried out, and the implementation is pursued AGOA helps to entrench Nigeria in its peripheral position of world economy. The skewed impacts of the application of the basic assumptions of David Ricardo’s comparative advantage postulation to the patterning of US–Nigeria’s trade under AGOA raises critical empirical questions. Consequently the paper concludes that rather than continuing to perform its historic economic rituals to global democratic capitalism Nigeria needs emancipation from the stranglehold of unremunerated primary exports or insolvency would scuttle it irretrievably into an ungovernable chaotic territorial entity.