CREDIT CHANNELS OF FINANCIAL SECTOR DEVELOPMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The development of the Nigerian financial system has been scrutinized in the recent years as to whether the system support the growth of the economy according to financial sector development theories. However, the inability of previous studies to adequately pay attention to the credit channels of financial sector development necessitated this study. Thus, using data from 1986 to 2018, this study provide a nexus between credit channels of financial sector development and economic growth in Nigeria estimated with Autoregressive Distributed Lag technique (ARDL). Findings from the Bound Co-integration result suggested a long-run relationship between credit channels of financial sector development and economic growth in Nigeria. The study found and concluded that, credit to core sector and credit to government impede economic growth in the short, with credit to core sector stimulating economic growth in the long run. The study recommended that effective policies should be formulated to further allocate more credit to the core sector as major driver of economic growth. Credit allocated to government should be judiciously utilized for growth enhancing purposes.

Keywords

• credit channel;
• growth;
• financial development;
• repression