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Abstract
The inclination to achieve a desirable level of economic development becomes a task amidst sumptuous unscrupulous cost of governance in Nigeria. Government at different levels and policymakers have been working round the clock to improve people’s welfare and reduce poverty despite huge resources the country is blessed but still confronted with avoidable challenges not helpful but disastrous to the economy. This is not unconnected to channeling funds to unproductive activities which are not yielding rewarding outcome .Therefore ,this paper examined the connection between cost of governance and economic development in Nigeria .To unravel this linkage this paper considered annual data set in Nigeria from 1986 to 2020 .The data set was estimated using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) as a series is a mixture of 1(0) and I(1).The results showed that General administration had negative (-0.0852) and significant (5%) on economic development ; also, the National security has negative (-0.1815) and significant (5%) and governance effectiveness had negative (-5.2463) .However ,National Assembly is positive (0.3238) and significant (5%) to economic development .These results suggests that some unscrupulous government spending do not contribute to improving economic development and may increase the incidence of poverty order than reducing it. Therefore, governments at various levels and policymakers need to orientate and encourage public office holders especially the Law makers and government functionaries to focus more on projects that will stimulate economic development in the country