The African Growth and Opportunity Act and the Development of the Textile Industry in Nigeria

Abstract

The Nigerian textile industry, which was once a vibrant sector of the economy, has gradually declined despite the lucrative opportunities offered by the African Growth and Opportunity Act AGOA, a trade preference programme established by the United States of America with a special non-reciprocal provision for textile trade between some sub-Saharan African nations and the US. As the scheme comes to an end in 2025, this study examines how AGOA’s trade preferences impacted the contribution of Nigeria’s textile industry to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2004 and 2022. While employing the Heckscher-Ohlin theory of international trade as a framework of analysis, and mixed methods of data collection involving interviews and estimation of time series data spanning 2000-2022, the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) result reveals that AGOA’s trade preferences did not significantly improve the contributions of Nigeria’s textile sector to the national GDP within the study period.