Effect of Exchange Rate on Domestic Price Level in Nigeria

Abstract

Nigeria experienced significant depreciation of her currency during the specified period of this study, mainly due to factors such as falling oil prices, external economic conditions such as slowdown in global economic growth, trade tensions which led to capital outflows from emerging markets including markets in Nigeria, tightening of global monetary policy which affected capital flows to these emerging markets, coupled with domestic macroeconomic challenges like concerns over policy consistency, governance issues and security challenges, capital flight and weakened investors’’ confidence. These conditions collectively created an adverse environment for the Nigerian economy, leading to the depreciation of Naira. Consequently, this study set out to achieve the main objective of investigating on a more recent basis, effects of exchange rate on domestic price level in Nigeria. The period covered was from January 2015 through December 2022. The study adopted the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and the variables included consumer price inflation, nominal exchange rate, import prices, international crude oil prices and real output growth. We found insignificant positive impact of the nominal exchange rate on consumer price inflation in Nigeria. The import prices also proved a significant effect on consumer price inflation in Nigeria. the study recommends that Governments at all levels in the country should encourage and support the innovative ideas of business firms and individuals. This will support local production, hence, there can be substitution of imported goods for domestically produced goods and the exchange rate will be stable.