Effect of crude oil revenue on the services sector growth in Nigeria

The Services sector is one of the most important sectors of the economy of every nation. In Nigeria, IT contributes more than half of the GDP and has substantial share in the country’s exports and employment. The objective of this paper is to empirically examine the effect of crude oil revenue on the service sector growth in Nigeria between 1981 and 2017. Time series data were sourced from secondary sources on Service Sector Growth (SEV), Labour (LAB), Capital (CAP) and Crude Oil Revenue (COR). The data sets were analysed based on the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds testing approach for co-integration that estimates the long-run and short-run relationship between variables. The result of the analysis reveals that labour and capital impacts negatively on service sector growth while crude oil revenue impacts positively on service sector growth in Nigeria within the period. The paper therefore recommends that government should increase her budgetary allocation to the services in addition to introducing fiscal and monetary policy measures that will impact positively on the sector and ensure fiscal discipline regarding spending of crude oil revenue in terms of putting infrastructural facilities in place so as to boost the services sector growth which will in turn enhance economic growth and development.