IMPACT OF HEALTH AND EDUCATION EXPENDITURES ON POVERTY REDUCTION IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Nigerian governments have continued to make concerted efforts on providing community goods and services to enhance welfare at the same time reduce poverty through its expenditures, yet no significant results as these expenditures are regularly influenced by factors such as corruption. Hence, this study look at the effect of health and education spending by government in reducing poverty in Nigeria spanning from 1996-2021 employing the ARDL bounds test methodology. Results of the analysis showed that spending on education and health expenditures are all significant at a 5 percent level of significance and are positively related to the dependent variable implying that on average, the higher the education and health expenditure, the higher the poverty reduction, ceteris paribus. While the short run results revealed that health expenditures negatively relate with poverty at the conventional level of significance, i.e 5 percent On the other hand, a positively significant association exists between spending on education and corruption with poverty reduction at a conventional level of 5 percent significance. The study suggested that the Nigerian government need to concentrate on improving the quality of health care services and that of education by spending more on policies and programme that are pro-poor via increasing investments in health and education, while the government implements anti-corruption measures to reduce all forms of corruption to the barest minimum