IMPACT OF GOVERNMENT HEALTH EXPENDITURE ON HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to empirically examine the impact of health expenditure on human development in Nigeria. Time-series data were used and the study employed the Autoregressive Distributed Lagged (ARDL) and Error Correction Model (ECM) to estimate and analyze the long and short-run impact of government health expenditure on human development in Nigeria. From the ARDL long-run result, it was revealed that government health expenditure has a positive impact on human development in Nigeria but the coefficients show that the impact was statistically insignificant. While ECM results revealed that all the independent variables were positively related to human development in Nigeria except the government total health expenditure which is negatively related to human development in Nigeria. Finally, based on the probability of the results all independent variables were statistically significant in explaining the variation in human development in Nigeria. This implies that government health recurrent expenditure in Nigeria and government health capital expenditure in Nigeria has a positive and significant impact on human development in Nigeria in the short-run. Therefore, the study recommends that the government through budget planning, implementation, and monitoring should ensure that health care funds are properly and fully utilized in Nigeria to improve the quality of health care expenditure for human development in Nigeria.