On the Determinants of Unemployment in Nigeria : What are the Roles of Trade Openness and Current Account Balance?

Attention of international trade and macroeconomic experts has focused on the effect of international trade, precisely trade openness, on economic growth and by extension on unemployment rate, albeit with mixed results. However, scanty attention has been drawn towards the effect of current account balance on unemployment rate despite the arguments from different quarters trailing such relationship. By employing Autoregressive Distribution Lag estimation technique, this study specifically focuses on the short-run dynamic and long-run effects of trade openness and current account balance on unemployment rate in Nigeria using the data that span 1981-2014. We found that trade openness worsens unemployment rate both in the short-run and long run. We also discovered that in the short run, current account balance increases unemployment rate but reduces it in the long run. Control variables used in the study such as inflation rate, exchange rate, and FDI followed a priori expectation while real GDP, wages and government consumption expenditure failed to follow a priori expectation. We, therefore, concluded that there is need for sound trade and macroeconomic policies to aid domestic firms' production to ensure international competitiveness of these firms so as to guarantee employment generation