Rising Unemployment in Nigeria-Public Debt to the Rescue?

Abstract

Among the macroeconomic challenges facing Nigeria as a country are weak growth of the economy, ever increasing unemployment rate, and increasing inequality occasioned by increasing poverty. In trying to mitigate these challenges, the Nigeria government usually run aborrowing. In all these, the unemployment rate keep rising year-on-year. In this study, we tried to find out whether borrowing will come to the rescue in reducing unemployment in Nigeria, using time series data from 1981 - 2019. Employing the VECM model, we carried out the stationarity and cointegration tests respectively. While the stationarity test confirmed all variables being stationary at I(1), existence of cointegration was also confirmed indicating a relationship between public debt and unemployment which turned out to be an inverse relationship. A high value of ECM was recorded. It was found that unemployment granger causes government debt and debt servicing. The overall result shows that public debt have rendered little or no assistance in combating unemployment in Nigeria. While we do not discourage government from borrowing for the provision of critical infrastructures, corruption should be put in check so as to allow the amount of borrowing be reflected on the infrastructures available, as public debt also have some adverse effects on the economy.