Effect of Inflation on the Growth and Development of the Nigerian Economy (An Empirical Analysis)

This paper investigates the impact of inflation on economic growth and development in Nigeria between 19702010 through the application of Augmented Dickey-Fuller technique in testing the unit root property of the series and Granger causality test of causation between GDP and inflation. The results of unit root suggest that all the variables in the model are stationary and the results of Causality suggest that GDP causes inflation and not inflation causing GDP. The results also revealed that inflation possessed a positive impact on economic growth through encouraging productivity and output level and on evolution of total factor productivity. A good performance of an economy in terms of per capita growth may therefore be attributed to the rate of inflation in the country. A major policy implication of this result is that concerted effort should be made by policy makers to increase the level of output in Nigeria by improving productivity/supply in order to reduce the prices of goods and services (inflation) so as to boost the growth of the economy. Inflation can only be reduced to the barest minimum by increasing output level (GDP).