An Economic Analysis of the Domestic Resource Cost and Effective Protection in Selected Nigerian Manufacturing Industries : 1970-1985

The study set out to appraise the foreign exchange saving or earning of import substi tuting industrialization wilh particular reference to the Nigerian manufacturing industries; examine the extent to which the tariff structure has affected industrialization;
and examine whether there was any bias in the manipulation of the tariff structure against or in favour of any group of industries.

Two basic approaches were adopted in the area of methodology The first dealt mainly with the evaluation of domestic ressource cost and the various measures of tariff protection in the Nigerian manufacturing industries for selected years. The second approach formulated models to examine the relationship between tariff structure and industrial development, employing the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression technique.

The study revealed that activities in the capital goods sector with the lowest protective measures had the lowest domestic
resource cost in terms of foreign exchange saving or earning while those activities in the consumer goods sector with the highest protective measures recorded the highest domestic cost of foreign exchange. The bias of the tariff structure was clearly in favour of the consumer goods sector and against the intermediate and capital goods sectors. In addition, the discriminations against experts as expressed by negative net effective protection were more pronounced.in the intermediate and capital goods sectors. The statistical methods employed revealed that, there were statistically significant relationships between the measures of tariff protection and industrial development in some versions of the models.