ABSTRACT
Economic diversification has been the glamour of successive administration in Nigeria, especially amidst the dwinding oil-revenue in recent years, which has resulted from the fluctuations in world crude oil prices. This study aim at investigating the impact of economic diversification and socioeconomic development in Nigeria. Secondary data on GDP growth and development rate as a proxy and development rate as a proxy for socio-economic development, non-oil GDP as a proxy for GDP diversification non-oil export as a proxy for export diversification, investment and exchange rate between 2010-2019, were adopted in the study. An econometric approach of ordinary least squares (OLS) was adopted to empirically analyze the collected data and result revealed that non-oil gross domestic product impacted positively and significantly on socio-economic development in Nigeria, within the period covered in the study. However, non-oil export and investment impacted positively but insignificantly on socio-economic development in Nigeria. The study recommends the encouragement of increase productivity in the real sector as well as the adoption of stable and favourable exchange rate policies by the government in order to accelerate socio-economic development in Nigeria.