THE ROLE OF SOME SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURES INDICATORS ON ECONOMIC GROWTH OF NIGERIA: A CAUSALITY ANALYSIS APPROACH

Abstract

This study aimed to examine, model, and compared the impact of investing in some social infrastructures like; transportation, communication technology, power, and educational sector indicators to the economic growth and development of Nigeria. This is important because of their incomparable contributions to the growth and development of a Nation. The data utilized in this study were sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin, 2021 edition. The collected data were analyzed using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. The existence of co-integration between investment in the four social infrastructures and economic growth was confirmed by the ARDL bound. The empirical findings revealed that investment in power has a positive but insignificant long-run effect on economic growth, investment in education positively and significantly affects economic growth while investment in transportation and communication technology were found to be insignificant with a negative impact on the Nigerian’ economic growth in the long-run. It was also discovered that the short-run relationship is somehow similar to the long-run relationship. The study recommends that Government should increase the budgetary allocation to the educational sector to address some of the reasons for the decline in the country’s economic growth as the results also shows that a 1% increase in budgetary allocation to the educational sector increases economic growth by over 5.1% and 1.5% in the long and short-run respectively.