Agricultural Credit and Output Performance of Rural Women Soybean Farmers in Sabon Gari Local Government Area, Kaduna State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study examined the asymmetric impacts of fiscal policy on manufacturing output in Nigeria over the period 1986–2023. Despite sustained fiscal interventions aimed at promoting industrialisation, the manufacturing sector has continued to exhibit weak performance, raising concerns about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in stimulating industrial growth. Guided by the Keynesian Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the study employed the Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model to investigate the short- and long-run asymmetric impacts of government capital expenditure, government recurrent expenditure, public debt, and tax revenue on manufacturing output. The findings reveal that fiscal policy exerts significant asymmetric impacts on manufacturing output. Government capital expenditure and tax revenue exhibited significant long-run asymmetric impacts on manufacturing output, while public debt produced weak positive impacts and government recurrent expenditure remained statistically insignificant. In the short run, reductions in inefficient capital expenditure and improvements in tax revenue were found to stimulate manufacturing sector output. These findings demonstrate that manufacturing output responds differently to positive and negative fiscal policy shocks, suggesting that conventional linear models may obscure important nonlinear relationships. The study contributes to the fiscal policy literature by providing empirical evidence that the effectiveness of fiscal interventions depends not only on their magnitude but also on their direction and composition. The study
recommends prioritising productive capital expenditure, strengthening tax administration and revenue mobilisation, improving debt sustainability, and adopting an asymmetric approach to fiscal policy design to enhance manufacturing-led industrial growth in Nigeria.