Purpose: The experience of rising trade imbalance between Nigeria and its key trading partners in recent years motivated this study. Previous studies on this issue either ignored bilateral level or assumed that the effect of crude oil price and/or exchange rate changes on trade balance is symmetric. Consequently, this study investigates whether Nigeria's bilateral trade balance with Belgium, China, United Kingdom (UK) and USA is responding symmetrically or asymmetrically to changes in oil price and exchange rate.Design/methodology/approach: The authors used nonlinear autoregressive-distributed lag (NARDL) model that decomposed oil price and exchange rate into partial sum processes of positive and negative changes over the period 1999Q1–2019Q4.Findings: The study finds that the effects of oil price hike and plunge asymmetrically influence Nigeria's trade balance with the UK and USA. Further evidence indicated that oil price plunge exerts greater influence than price hike in all the cases, except the UK in the long run. Furthermore, Nigeria's trade balance responds asymmetrically and significantly to changes in exchange rate with China in the long run and with China and the UK in the short run. Specifically, the depreciation effect is more prominent than appreciation.Originality/value: Significant contributions to the existing literature in Nigeria include the recognition that the effects of oil price and exchange rate changes on trade are asymmetric and the disaggregation of trade into bilateral level to identify country-specific effect.

Motivated by the persistent rise in bilateral trade imbalance in Nigeria, this paper empirically examines whether Nigeria's four trading partners (China, India, the UK and the US) respond asymmetrically to changes in the oil price and exchange...

Motivated by the persistent fall in oil prices due to incessant uncertainty-inducing events in recent years, this study empirically examined if economic growth in Africa's top five oil exporters (Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Libya, and Nigeria) is ...

Impacts of public debt remains unclear in Africa due to some heterogeneous macroeconomic fundamentals. Hence, this study focuses on a highly indebted nation, Nigeria, and Botswana, with a relatively low debt profile. The study utilizes the dual gap theoretical framework and deploys the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to study external debt, and its influence on sectoral performance in Nigeria and Botswana between 1981 and 2019. The study focuses on the following three sectors; service, agriculture and industry with data from World Development Indicators (WDI). Findings reveal that only agricultural sector is influenced positively by external debt in Botswana, while external debt in the long run has a significantly detrimental impact in the Nigerian agricultural sector. We therefore, recommend both governments to be prompt in monitoring of loans, right from when it is acquired to how it is being spent.