Unlocking Nigeria’s non-oil export potential: Do trade financing and digital payment play a role?

Nigeria’s poor non-oil export performance has been the focal point of the growth policy discourse since the 1970s, but the role of emerging driving factors has remained significantly less understood. Thus, this study explores the determinants of Nigeria’s non-oil exports by explicitly considering trade credit and digital payment systems. The study employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model and the monthly data from 2010 to 2023 so as to achieve its objective. The results show that increased trade credit and better e-payment systems significantly improve the non-oil export sector’s performance. The one implication of this finding is that increasing trade credit and improving e-payment systems may serve as another alternative to unlocking and boosting Nigeria’s non-oil export sector’s potential. Therefore, the paper concludes that, with the promotion of trade credit and an increased use of e-payments, Nigeria can improve its non-oil export performance in order to foster sustainable economic growth.