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.
