The Service Sector-Led Growth Relationship: The Case of Nigeria

This paper examined the impact of the service sector on economic growth of Nigeria. The study covers the period 1981 to 2019 and data were obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria statistical bulletin. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller unit root, Granger Causality test, Vector Autoregressive (VAR) approach, Bounds test for cointegration, and vector error correction mechanism were utilized in analysing the data. Findings of the study revealed that a bidirectional causality exist between service sector and economic growth of Nigeria. Meanwhile, the VAR result presented an evidence of weak exogeneity of the service sector in predicting economic growth. However, both broad money supply and total government expenditure exerted a significant impact on economic growth. From the impulse response function, it was discovered that economic growth responded negatively to shocks in service sector output both in the short run and in the long run; while the variance decomposition indicated that gross domestic product (a proxy for economic growth) is strongly endogenous in predicting itself in the short run while such diminishes in the long run. The Bounds test for cointegration revealed evidence of long run equilibrium relationship and the error correction mechanism revealed that 88.30% of the short run disequilibrium in the gross domestic product are corrected annually. Meanwhile, it was discovered that professional, scientific and technical services is the major contributor to economic growth as captured by its short run and long run elasticity coefficients of 0.5936 and 0.9455 respectively. The paper recommended the need for stimulating industrialization as this is the major pathway through which the service sector can positively impact economic growth.