Abstract
The study examined the causal links among trade liberalisation, economic growth and human resource development in Nigeria with a view to identifying the nexus connecting these three variables. Inferences of causality were drawn within the framework of Vector Auto-regression model employing techniques of analysis involving unit root test, cointegration and Granger causality tests. The findings that emerged from the analysis show that economic growth granger-caused both poverty level and trade liberalization in Nigeria. Besides, trade liberalization equally predicted poverty level. The study therefore concluded that it is desirable for government to initiate strategies that would further boost economic growth in Nigeria in order to alleviate poverty and to derive maximum benefits from trade liberalization. In addition, government should further diversify the productive base of the economy, and ensure proper integration of the key sectors of the economy to enhance output growth. In order to reduce poverty level, trade liberalization needs to be further embraced using multi-dimensional approaches such as more tariff reduction, and systematic reduction or removal of other forms of quantitative and qualitative restrictions on goods and services.
Highlights
Poverty has posed a great challenge to the survival of the developing nations of the world in their bid to attain convergence with the rich nations of the world
The findings suggested that the positive effect of trade on on-the-job human capital accumulation was significant when controlling for gross domestic product (GDP), educational attainment and institutional quality
The null hypothesis (Ho) is that there is a unit root process. It could be inferred from the results presented in table 7 that all the variables are stationary at first difference; that is, they are integrated of order one (I(1)).The only variable that showed sign of being integrated in level is LRGDP which appeared to be counter-intuitive
Summary
Poverty has posed a great challenge to the survival of the developing nations of the world in their bid to attain convergence with the rich nations of the world. The severity of poverty has been linked to the poor state of human resource development in the less developed countries which has greatly hampered the full realisation of the potentials of the existing labour force to optimally contribute to the output growth of the economy. The importance of human resource development has long been recognised as a crucial factor and strategy for alleviating poverty and capable of inducing rapid economic growth of less developed countries (Ranis and Stewart, 2001). Poverty alleviation strategy by way of human resource development has the potentials to increase the quality of labour force productivity which further improves the volume and quality of exports and economic growth (Chuang, 2000). The need to examine the causal relations between human resource development and trade liberalisation becomes pertinent
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