INTERNATIONAL TRADE INTENSITIES AND DOMESTIC POLICY DEPENDENCY: A CASE STUDY OF NIGERIA

The predictor variables in existing models of determinants of government expenditures in industrialized countries are almost entirely domestic in character. Whatever the adequacy of such model specifications for industrialized countries, their application to a developing country like Nigeria may be quite unsatisfactory. This project uses historical and statistical methods to test whether variations in Nigeria's 1963-1978 government spending patterns were more sensitive to changes, in domestic socio-economic and political indicators or to certain fluctuations in her relations with (1) the United Kingdom and (2) the United States. Indices of Nigeria's relation with each country conceptually equivalent to Savage's and Deutsch's (1960) 'Relative Acceptance' and Wright's (1942) Political Distance criteria are generated in the form of trade intensities with respect to a defined global subsystem. The analysis concludes that (a) periphery/core trade volumes may not be the primary cause of a periphery's dependency. (b) actor-types in the dependency infrastructure as revealed in the study of the Latin American region may not be similar in all peripheries. (c) the United Kingdom not the United States remain the primary core influence in Nigeria. (d) "International relations" is a primary predictor of Nigeria's public sector scope.