Economic Diversification of Nigeria and Small and Medium Scale Enterprise (SME) Development (2000-2017)

Abstract

The broad objective of this paper is to assess the extent of relationship between economic diversification of Nigeria and SME development. Specifically, this paper seeks to ascertain the extent of relationship between new business development in Nigeria and technical skills acquisition by Nigerians. Expo-facto research design was adopted for the study, a panel data of 2000-2017 was used for the study, the augumented Dickey Fuller root test was used to test the stationarity of the data, while the analysis of the data was done using regression analysis. The findings revealed that there is a relationship between new business development in Nigeria and technical skills acquisition by Nigerians since (R 2 =0.93, R-2 =0.89, F=49.65). The researcher therefore concluded that economic diversification of Nigeria impacts SME development. It was against this backdrop that the researchers recommended that the Nigerian government should strive towards an improvement of the credit available to SME's and the Nigerian government should enactment and implement policies that would help curb the inflation rate in Nigeria as it affects the performance of SME's