چکیده:
Can rural financial inclusion enhance agricultural growth? This study, using annual data over the period 1981-2014 and the ARDL bounds testing approach, captures the long run as well as the short-run dynamics of the relationship between financial inclusion and agriculture in Nigeria. The results show that usage of financial services has significant impacts on agriculture both in the short and the long run, meaning that for sustainable agricultural development in rural areas, improving financial inclusion is critical. On the contrary, access to finance has insignificant impacts on agricultural growth. The message is: While provision of access to finance to rural farmers could have many benefits, it is more important to consider the usage of the finance in the rural settings and its impact on rural outcomes that we care about. There is a need for more traditional and non-traditional financial service providers to go back to the land and innovate in the Nigerian agricultural space in order to boost financial inclusion in Nigeria while also substantially reducing poverty and stimulating agricultural growth.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The benefits of an inclusive financial system are decline in the cost of capital, efficient allocation of productive resources, decline in informal sources of credit and expansion in the day-to-day management of finances (Sarma & Pais, 2008; Evans, 2015, 2016; Evans and Adeoye, 2016; Adeola and Evans, 2017a, 2017b; Evans and Lawanson, 2017).
The second step is the estimation of the short-run and long-run parameters of the error correction model: The ARDL procedure is implemented thus: q q A GRICULTURE t 0 1A GRICULTURE t i 1A CCESS t i i 0 i 0 q q q q 1USA GE t i 1MONEY t i 1INTERESTt i 1GDPC t i i 0 i 0 i 0 i 0 1A GRICULT URE t 1 2 A CCESS t 1 3USA GE t 1 4 MONEY t 1 4 INT ERESTt 1 4GDPC t 1 ECTt 1 t where AGRICULTURE is the log of agriculture share of GDP, INTEREST is lending interest rate, MONEY is the log of broad money, GDPC is the log of GDP per capita, ACCESS is the number of commercial bank branches per 1000 km2 and USAGE is the log of outstanding loans from the financial sector to the agricultural sector as % of GDP.
This study, using annual data over the period 1981-2014 and the ARDL bounds testing approach, captures the long run as well as the short-run dynamics of the relationship between financial inclusion and agriculture in Nigeria.