IMPACT OF EDUCATION BUDGET ON POVERTY REDUCTION IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The study investigated impact of education spending on poverty reduction using annual data from 1980 to 2019. Autoregressive Distributed Lag model and Granger test were adopted for the analysis. The result showed that population growth, inflation, and domestic capital formation negatively affected life expectancy, hence retarded poverty reduction in long and short-run. Government expenditure on education and health services positively correlated with life expectancy, indicating positive impacts on poverty reduction in the long and short -run. On the Contrary, recurrent education expenditure in short-run had negative effect on poverty reduction. Granger causality indicated unidirectional relationship between education spending and poverty reduction in Nigeria.