Does Commercial Banking Activities Exerts on Agricultural Growth in Nigeria? Evidence from ARDL Framework

Abstract

The current study examined the Impact of commercial bank loan activities on Nigeria's agricultural productivity with a focus on the impact of the agricultural sector credit guarantee scheme fund, commercial Bank credits to agricultural output, interest rate and the government recurrent expenditure on the agriculture sector. We employed the newly developed augmented regressive distributed lag to examine whether or not commercial lending activities enhances productivity. Our results shows that though a positive relationship exist between agricultural output and each of agricultural sector credit guarantee scheme fund and the government recurrent expenditure on the agriculture sector, the relationship is not significant. The result also shows that a positive but not significant relationship exists between commercial Bank credits to agricultural output, and that a negative but significant relationship exists between interest rate and agriculture output. The implication is that increase in commercial bank lending has not been able to induce positive growth in the agricultural output in Nigeria. Our results provoke insights thinking on the role of commercial banking activities in advancing agriculture in Nigeria.