TIME SERIES ANALYSIS OF NIGERIAN EXTERNAL RESERVES
Okeregwu, Blessing Amaka and Etuk, Ette Harrison
Department of Mathematics,
Rivers State University, P.M.B 5080, Nkpolu-Oroworukwo, Port Harcourt
E-mail: okeregwuamakablessing26@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The need for proper understanding of the trend of the Nigeria’s external reserves can not be over emphasized, as it would help the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Federal Government of Nigeria to make policies that would grow her economy. In view of this, this paper attempts to identify and build a suitable and reliable Box-Jenkins model for modeling the Nigeria’s external reserves. Nigeria’s 34 years external reserve data from January, 1981 to December, 2014 was used to perform analysis in E-views. The ARIMA (4,1,0) model with the smallest AIC and BIC statistics was found to out-perform the ARIMA (4,1,1) model. This paper therefore proposes the ARIMA (4,1,0) model for forecasting Nigeria’s external reserves. Keywords: Time series, Box-Jenkins model, ARIMA, External Reserves
