Structural breaks in natural gas consumption and economic growth in Nigeria: evidence from new time series tests that allow for structural breaks

This paper analyzed the issue of structural breaks in natural gas consumption and economic growth in Nigeria. The newly residual augmented least squares (RALS-LM) unit root test with breaks also known as “RALS-LM test with trend breaks and non-normal errors” proposed by Meng-Lee-Payne (2017) and the new structural breaks testing proposed by Kejriwal–Perron (2010) are among the tools used for the investigation. Our empirical findings provide significant evidence that the series of natural gas consumption and economic growth are stationary with one or two trend breaks. Furthermore, the investigation identified significant incidences of structural breaks in the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth in 1990, 2004, 2009 and all the break dates were found to be significant. The evaluation of the sub-sample periods based on the break dates revealed that the first and second breaks are potential while the last is destructive. Moreover, the estimate of the long-run elasticity is significant where a 1% increase in natural gas consumption induces the growth of Nigerian economy by 0.15% and all the dummies that represent the breakpoints are also significant where the 2004 break had a bigger effect among other breaks. The implication of the results is that shocks in the series of natural gas consumption and economic growth in Nigeria have transitory effect, modeling the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth in Nigeria without taking structural breaks into consideration could produce biased and unreliable statistical results, and there is economically significant dependence of the Nigerian economy on natural gas consumption.