The determinants of public expenditure on educational infrastructural facilities and economic growth in Nigeria

Public expenditure on education is of great importance to any national development and plays a critical role in promoting growth and equity, and through both channels, help to reduce poor quality as well as improving the standard of education. In Nigeria over the years, poor financial resources to the educational sector have been a major problem in the educational system. Poor financing of the educational sector has resulted to poor attendance, poor quality of students, inadequate preparation by teachers at all levels and low morale of teachers as a result of low basic condition of services and low salaries. The major objective of this study is to examine the Determinants of public expenditure on Infrastructural facilities in education and economic growth in Nigeria based on time series data on variables considered relevant indicators of economic growth and public expenditure. A public expenditure model was constructed and tested using the ordinary least squares (OLS) technique. A dummy variable was introduced to test the expenditure variability between regime changes (military and civilian) to ascertain which regime allocated more funds to the educational sector in Nigeria during the period under the study. Data for the study was obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria, NBS and the World Bank. Results of the analysis showed that public expenditure on education has a significant impact on economic growth. But expenditure on education is different between regimes but not significant. Consequently, in model (1), Adult Enrolment ratio (AER) influenced Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP) by 540.4365 at a unit change, and AER is not a good predictor of economic growth, while in some it does, while model (2) result showed that expenditure in education during the civilian regime had the intercept of 22932.02, the military regime spent 22927.89 more than the civilian regime in Nigeria.