Public Spending on Education and Economic Growth in Nigeria: The Synergy

For a State or Society to achieve a sustainable development, the quality of its education should be
improved. Nigeria has over the years invested substantially to improve the educational attainment of
the labour force and to raise productivity but still faces declining real output and slow economic
growth. However, this study explores the impact of public spending on education and economic
growth in Nigeria from 1981 to 2019. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test and ARDL bounds
cointegration test was used in the analysis. The research findings revealed that education expenditure
has negative but significant impact on economic growth in Nigeria. Also, education expenditure has
negative but significant impact on standard of living in Nigeria. The negative impact of education
expenditure may not be unconnected with the fluctuating nature of Nigeria’s pattern of education
sector expenditure. However, schools at all level in Nigeria are characterized with humiliating features
where schools lacks teachers, basic infrastructures and suffers from poor management, poor
sanitation, overcrowding, poor intra sectoral allocation, inadequate funding, poor conditions of service
among others, therefore leads to current Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike which
consequently manifest in low economic quality of the labour force. Accordingly, the study
recommended that Government should create conducive atmosphere for learning, allocation of
enough funds for educational development, discouraging gender disparity in education through
enlightenment programme, setting up a trustworthy committee that will manage and supervise
education system in Nigeria. Also, education is critical to economic growth and improvement of
standard of living and investment in human capital is essential for any economy for growth
sustainability. However, increasing government allocation on social welfare such as education and
health is not enough to improve standard of living. Allocation and distribution efficiency is also
required so as to produce the desired result.