The study investigates the effect of public health expenditure on health outcomes in Nigeria, as captured by life expectancy at birth and infant mortality rates. The result shows that public health expenditure and health outcomes have long-run equilibrium relationship. Furthermore, the results showed that an increase in public health expenditure improves life expectancy and reduces infant mortality rates. In addition, urban population and HIV prevalence rate significantly affects health outcomes, while per capita income exhibits no effect on health outcomes in Nigeria. The findings suggest that public health expenditure remains a necessary component in improving health outcomes in Nigeria.

Vědecký časopis Vysoké školy ekonomické v Praze

Infrastructural development has been the major concern of countries all over the world due to its significant impact in fostering growth. In Nigeria, it has been observed that the level of infrastructure posed serious threat to attaining sustained growth. This study therefore examines the impact of capital expenditure on infrastructural development in Nigeria, utilising time series from 1970 to 2017. The study adopted autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model due to the possibility of the past value of the dependent variable explaining its present value, and found that capital expenditure, construction expenditure and non-oil revenue have the potency of accentuating infrastructural development in the long-run but such is being hampered by external debt. The positive effect of recurrent expenditure on infrastructural development is a pointer that bulk of the expenditure in Nigeria over the years is recurrent in nature. These suggest the need to boost non-oil revenue, reduce recurrent and channel external debt into productive infrastructural development.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop and apply a distributional impact assessment methodology to empirically analyze distributional impact of public expenditure on human development using data from 20 states in Nigeria. For robustness of the analysis, expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development, energy, housing, environmental protection and portable water resources are employed as predictors of human development. The result reveals that expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development. In contrast, the marginal impact of energy, housing and environmental protection is negative. Among the sectors, education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources expenditure has positive marginal impact while energy, housing and environmental protection have decreasing marginal impact on human development. Design/methodology/approach: Panel approach. Findings: The result reveals that expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development. Originality/value: A panel approach is used to investigate whether expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development.