By Ugbam, Charles Ogechukwu
The Nigerian manufacturing sector should play a major role in the economic development of the country and the actualization of the Millennium Development Goals. However, its performance indices- profit, capacity utilization, contribution to GDP- indicate that the sector has performed poorly. Studies on the impact of the business environment on the sector blame its poor performance on the external environment. These studies had one feature in common-they adopted the inertia approach which sees the organisation as being at the mercy of its external environment. This study, which examined the impact of the business environment on the performance of manufacturing firms in Nigeria from an adaptation perspective, was conceived as an attempt make for a balanced understanding of this problem. This work adopts the field survey research design and involves 16 organisations randomly selected from the chemical and pharmaceutical sub-sector of the Nigerian manufacturing sector. The population of the study was determined to be 283 and since it was considered manageable, the entire population was studied. The study was guided by six key objectives from which appropriate research questions and objectives were formulated. Secondary data was sourced from libraries and the Internet while primary data was collected through the use of Likert 5-scale questions contained in a questionnaire developed specifically for this study. The data collected was presented in frequency tables while percentages and statistical techniques were used to analyze the data. The research hypotheses were tested with the t-statistic at a 95% level of confidence.