Relationship Between Selected Health Indicators and Human Development in Nigeria

Abstract

The challenges, such as poor services, being faced by the Nigerian Health Sector have motivated this research and the issues of the sector's performance in recent times. The paper employs the ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) bounds test approach to cointegration and error correction analysis to investigate the long-run and short-run relationship of health indicators (capital health expenditure, recurrent health expenditure, and life expectancy rate) on human development index in Nigeria from 1990 to 2021. The empirical evidence validates the Mushkin's health-led growth hypothesis as total expenditure on health is observed to have had positive and no signicant long-run and shortrun effects on the economy. Evidence from the analysis is that both recurrent health expenditure and life expectancy rate impact on Human Development Index (HDI) in the long run, but capital and recurrent health expenditure negatively impact HDI in the short run. However, life expectancy is positive and highly significant in the short run. The paper recommends, inter alia, monitoring of the budgetary allocation to the health sector in order to address the prevalent corruption in the industry and to enhance its contribution to the human development index. It also recommends more training opportunities and improvement for the welfare of the people.