The Impact of Government Revenue and Expenditure on the Economic Development of Cross River State, Nigeria

Requirement of governments to provide public goods and execute other developmental projects that would improve living standard of citizenry as well as meet its recurrent expenditure necessitate intensified revenue generation efforts both internally and externally. Collection of taxes is one of the formidable options to generate revenue. Based on the backdrop, this paper set out to empirically examine the impact of public revenue (taxation) and government expenditure (spending) on the development of the Cross River economy. The theoretical underpinning of the paper is hinged on the Fiscal-synchronization hypothesis, Spend-and-tax hypothesis and the endogenous growth theory. With a sample size of 80 respondents, the study adopted the survey design with data tested using Regression model from SPSS. The result shows that there is a significant relationship between public revenue, government spending and economic development. It was thus recommended from the findings that the government should diversify their source of revenue in order to operate a stable revenue base to perform their spending and properly manage their capital and recurrent expenditure in a manner that will raise the state’s production capacity.