Measuring Advertising Expenditure Effects on the Nigerian Economy

This study explores relationships between annual advertising expenditure and major macroeconomic variables in Nigeria. Advertising is sometimes viewed as a concern of business units only not worth being researched at macroeconomic level. This nature has been mostly studied on advertising industries in the advanced economies. Due to a lack of high frequency time series data on advertising expenditure in the developing economies, this work has been limited to an exploratory study using the multiple regression and correlation analysis. The study covers the period of 2001 to 2018. Its findings show that advertising has positive relationship with GDP and savings. This study provides further evidence on the cyclical nature of advertising that moves with the state of the economy. During the economic slowdown in the period of 2015 to 2017, Nigeria advertising expenditure continued to fall. In 2013, the period with the highest advertising revenue in the study, the ratio of advertising expenditure as percentage of GDP accounted for 0.061%, which was below 0.2%, a very negligible number indicating more scope for growth in the market.