Preferential trade agreement as path to economic development: The case of Nigeria's response to African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)

This dissertation examines the issue of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) as a vehicle for economic growth. It focuses on how Nigeria has implemented the United States' African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) which is a PTA aimed at offering eligible Sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to U.S. markets of many of their textile and agro-based products. It is envisaged that the Act would help promote economic growth through trade expansion for the eligible countries. Since Nigeria is a major AGOA participant, and offers the largest market in Africa, examining AGOA implementation in Nigeria is pertinent in understanding the successes and challenges of the Act.; The research made use of both secondary and primary data sources. The primary data included interviews with AGOA stakeholders in Nigeria who responded to questionnaires distributed to them either by mail or in-person. In all, the findings reveal among other things, that although its implementation has had some major challenges, AGOA is helping in trade expansion and economic growth in Nigeria through increase in export and implementation of its conditionalities, which have encouraged reforms and trade capacity building (TCB) initiatives. However, the targeted industry and sector (textile and agriculture respectively) are yet to witness significant export growth although they hold great potential for success. This does not suggest a failure of the Act but need to re-evaluate its objective vis-a-vis its achievement after six years of implementation. Although the findings in this research may not be generalized to other participating Sub-Saharan countries given that each country has fairly unique political and economic conditions that produce different implementation outcomes, there are reasons to believe that the Nigerian case offers a clue about the general issues AGOA is facing in the participating countries. The research offers recommendations in the light of the findings.