Monetary Policy and Nigeria's Trade Balance, 1980-2018

Accepted: 30 December 2020 Abstract Several countries have integrated monetary easement into their foreign policy to faucet the gains from trade thereby, assuring that market forces determine monetary policy instruments such as interest rate and exchange rate. It is on this note and this paper empirically evaluate the effect of monetary policy on Nigeria’s trade balance using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model on the time series data spanning from 1980 to 2018. The findings reveal that monetary policy tools of real interest and effective exchange rate have a longrun co-integration relationship and significant adverse effects on Nigeria’s trade balance both in the short-run and long-run. Thus, the paper concludes that monetary policy is a veritable tool through which Nigeria can maintain a favorable trade balance. Therefore, policymakers should step on measures that will maintain low-interest rates to sustain a flexible exchange rate and remove all rigidities associated with the international payment system.