Maritime Transit Corridors and Nigeria Economic Performance: Evaluating Port Cargo Throughput as Growth Amplifier (An Academic Manuscript and Policy Framework)

Abstract

Maritime advantageous nations like Nigeria are expected to be wealthy, as most revenue from global trade moves by sea enabling  maritime advantageous nations to theoretically benefit through port revenues, shipping services  and shipbuilding . However, the dichotomy in Nigeria’s case is worrisome. Despite its 853km coastline and 6 major ports,  the country has not fully translated these maritime benefits into sustained national wealth as it remained theoretically wealthy but statistically poor. This study examines the  amplifier role of maritime transit corridors in Nigeria’s GDP growth from 2015 to 2025 using ordinary least squares regression. Port cargo throughput is used as a proxy for the efficiency of Nigeria’s maritime logistics infrastructure and transit corridors. Other variables include trade volume, inflation, oil export value, and oil price. Data were sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria, National Bureau of Statistics, Nigerian Ports Authority, with oil price data from OPEC and benchmarks from the World Bank and IMF. All I(1) variables were first-differenced to ensure stationarity.  The empirical results show that the model captures a high degree of predictive power, explaining 74.2% of the total variance in Nigeria’s real GDP growth (R² = 0.742, F = 3.82, p = 0.028), with no evidence of serial correlation (DW = 2.10). The findings clearly indicat that while d total trade volume exerts a powerful, direct positive impact on economic expansion (β = 0.612, p = 0.012), cargo throughput functions as a statistically significant growth amplifier (β = 0.0045, p = 0.047). Every additional unit of cargo efficiently processed through national port infrastructure directly reduces transaction costs and boosts aggregate domestic output. Among the control variables, structural inflation retards economic growth (β = -0.0087, p = 0.069), while physical crude oil export volumes remain a critical baseline driver of national income (β = 0.215, p = 0.062), outperforming the impact of volatile international oil prices (β = 0.0011, p = 0.489). The study concludes that while international trade volume provides the external catalyst for development, the internal operational efficiency and physical capacity of maritime gateways determine how much of that growth potential is absorbed by the domestic economy. Based on these findings, it is recommended that the federal government should among others accelerate single-window port digitalization, expand intermodal connectivity and Prioritize” Port Efficiency and Decongestion” as a Macroeconomic Policy .