Trade Outwardness and International Financial Flows in Nigeria

This study used the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model to investigate the impact of international financial flows on trade outwardness in Nigeria. With dataset covering the period 1999 – 2023 drawn from the World Development Indicator, which is a repository of the World Bank, official development assistance (ODA), Foreign portfolio investment (FPI) and foreign direct investment (FDI) were used as proxies for international financial flows. The quotient of the sum of export and import over gross domestic product represented trade outward which found to positively and significantly respond to changes in ODA and FPI and insignificantly and negative respond to FDI. It is recommended that trade outwardness should be tailored in the direction of international financial flows while harnessing the benefits of trade and mitigating the adverse effects of trade relations. This can be done through protective import strategies and export promotion methods.