Abstract
The task of achieving sustainable economic growth has preoccupied the policy goals of modern government including Nigeria. Persistent low budgetary allocations to critical sectors such as health and education by successive government in Nigeria has continued to hamper the growth of the economy with its attendant consequences on living standard, diseases, low life expectancy, high level of unemployment and rise in multi-dimensional poverty. This study estimated the short run relationship between
government spending on healthcare, education and economic growth of Nigeria. It adopted series of standard econometrics method using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model (ARDL) to estimate to estimate the effect of government spending on healthcare and education on Nigeria's GDP as well as to estimate the short and long run relationship between government spending on health, education and economic growth in Nigeria. The result obtained was subjected to several post estimation test to confirm the robustness of the result obtained for accurate policy forecast and prediction. The result obtained from the study revealed that government spending on health has significant positive effect on economic growth. Also, government spending on education showed significant positive effect on economic growth in Nigeria. The cointegration result showed the existence of a short run relationship among the variables studied. Finally, the findings revealeda significant positive relationship between government expenditure
on education and economic growth. It further indicated one per cent increase in government expenditure on education leads to 0.17 per cent increase in GDP growth. In the same vein, primary enrollment contributed significantly to economic growth; one per cent increase in school enrollment brought about 0.019 rise in Nigeria's GDP. On the other hand, the ARDL short run result obtained indicated a negative and significant relationship between government healthcare expenditure and economic growth. The study there recommends that government at all levels should step up their budgetary allocations in healthcare and education to boost productivity and quality of lives of the people.