Unlocking Nigeria's Maritime and Logistics Power for Economic Growth (1960–2025) A Long-Run Empirical Investigation Using ARDL Bounds Testing

Nigeria commands the longest coastline in the Gulf of Guinea and operates the busiest port complex in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet six decades of independence have not translated this maritime endowment into sustained, diversified economic growth. This paper investigates the long-run relationship between maritime and logistics infrastructure and Nigeria's economic growth over the period 1960–2025, using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach supplemented by Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) and Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS) for robustness. Thirteen variables — encompassing port capacity, road and rail network quality, trade openness, inflation, exchange rate, foreign direct investment, purchasing power parity, trade policy, global trade growth, population growth, and urbanisation — are modelled against annual GDP growth. Results confirm statistically significant long-run cointegration. Port throughput (β = 0.387, p < 0.01), road network quality (β = 0.261, p < 0.05), rail freight (β = 0.182, p < 0.05), and FDI (β = 0.231, p < 0.01) exert significant positive effects on growth. Inflation, exchange rate depreciation, and restrictive trade policy exert significant negative effects. The findings expose a persistent infrastructure-growth nexus, underscoring the urgency of public–private investment in port modernisation, intermodal logistics corridors, and institutional reform. The study contributes a comprehensive six-decade time-series dataset, a novel composite logistics–growth model, and actionable policy recommendations for Nigeria's post-oil diversification agenda.