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Researchers have long been interested in testing the validity of Okun’s law due to its macroeconomic policy implications. However, most of the studies have focused on testing the law using aggregate data on unemployment and output. In recent times, attention has been shifted to testing the law at the sectoral level. In light of this, the purpose of this study is to examine the response of unemployment to sectoral outputs in Nigeria using the data that covers a period from 1981-2020.

To test the validity of Okun’s law at the sectoral level, both difference and gap methods of specifying Okun’s law are used. Furthermore, the author also uses a series of estimation methods, which include ordinary least squares (OLS), dynamic OLS (DOLS), fully modified OLS (FMOLS) and canonical cointegration regression (CCR).

The results, based on the difference model, are mixed irrespective of estimation and data filter methods. For the gap model, Okun’s law holds for all sectors irrespective of estimation techniques (especially DOLS, FMOLS and CCR) when the Hodrick–Prescott filter method is used to filter data. However, the author discovers that the coefficients of Okun’s law vary across the sectors as the response of unemployment to services sector output is greater than the rest of the sectors. When the Hamilton filter method is used to filter data, the results appear to be mixed across the sectors. The results are almost ditto when all the sectoral variables are put in one model.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the validity of sectoral Okun’s law in Nigeria, the leading economy in Africa.

The industrial sector has been identified as one of the means to address the issue of unemployment due to its role in ensuring sustainable development. However, evidence from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin reveals that the sector lags behind the agricultural and services sector in terms of its contribution to the gross domestic product. In light of this, the purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether the industrial sector development is a veritable tool in addressing the issue of unemployment in the long run for the Nigerian economy.

In order to determine whether industrial development is a veritable tool in addressing the issue of unemployment in the long run, the study makes use of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model. The choice of this method over the commonly used Johansen co-integration approach is that it provides the mechanism to estimate the model in the presence of different order of integration among the macroeconomic variables; it allows us to combine and I(0) and I(1) series, while there is strict assumption of I(1) for all variables under the Johansen approach.

The major finding of the paper is that an inverse and elastic relationship exists between industrial output and unemployment. This suggests that the unemployment rate is very sensitive to changes in the industrial sector in Nigeria.

The major limitation is the availability of recent data to capture recent happenings in the Nigerian economy.

The paper considers the entire sector encompassed in the industrial sector as opposed to focusing on just the manufacturing sector.