Agricultural Financing, Agricultural Output Growth and Employment Generation in Nigeria

Anotace: This study investigates the impact of agricultural financing and agricultural output growth on employment generation in Nigeria from 1981 to 2017. The study adopts the framework of the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Model for analysis. The empirical results show that while agricultural financing increases employment generation in both the short run and long run, the lag of agricultural output growth increases employment generation mainly in the short run. Other variables found to have significant effect on employment generation were price and agricultural output while labor force population, wages and aggregate expenditure were insignificant. The study concludes that policy makers should endeavor to see that every fund allocated for a specific agricultural schemes and interventions should be fully utilized for its purpose. To increase employment opportunities, there should be careful monitoring of the implementation of each scheme and policy to realize their specific objectives.