This study investigates the impact of bank credit on economic growth in Nigeria applying the reduced form of vector autoregressive (VAR) technique using time series data from 1960 to 2011. Current gross domestic product (GDP) is the dependent variable and proxy for economic growth while bank credit to the private sector (CPS) to GDP ratio and broad money (M2) to GDP ratio were proxies for financial indicator and financial depth respectively. We tested the stationarity of the variables using the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and Phillips Perron (PP) unit root tests. All the variables were integrated of order one i.e., I (1). A major finding is that there is a significant positive relationship between bank credit to the private sector, broad money and economic growth. The past values of all the variables were significant in predicting their current values. This result implies that the bank consolidation and recapitalization exercise was a welcome development and further steps should be taken to ensure the stability of the banking sector.
Keywords: Bank credit, Broad money, Vector Autoregression, economic growth
