Suchergebnisse

The role of infrastructure in promoting economic development has long been acknowledged in the economic literature. In Nigeria, the basic physical infrastructure deficit has been identified as a major drag in the country's prospects for development. One major source of infrastructure financing is government capital expenditure. Unfortunately, capital expenditure over the years has been characterized by wide fluctuations, with attendant consequences on the level of infrastructural development. Thus, this study seeks to investigate the nexus between capital expenditure dynamics and infrastructural performance within the Nigerian context, utilizing the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) and Error correction procedure (ECM) and data from 1981 to 2018. Findings suggest that both capital expenditure dynamics and inflation rate have a negative and statistically significant impact on the level of infrastructure while the impact of foreign aid on infrastructural development was positive and significant. Accordingly, we recommend among others, the need for a suitable macroeconomic and regulatory framework that will encourage active private sector participation to sustainably support infrastructure investment. The monetary authorities can complement such efforts by implementing policies that will guarantee at most single-digit inflation rate in the economy.

Abstract
This paper adopts the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimation method to investigate the moderating role of institutional quality in military spending and the unemployment rate nexus in Nigeria for the period from 1984 to 2019. It also tests the direction of causality between military spending and unemployment using the Toda-Yamamoto Granger non-causality method. The causality results show that the direction of causality depends on the measure of military spending used. The main results indicate that military spending only reduces unemployment in the short run and worsens unemployment in the long run. The results further show that institutional quality does not play any significant moderating role in the relationship between military spending and unemployment. Based on our findings, we advocate that the government should allocate its expenditure properly, especially to the most productive sectors of the economy instead of increasing military spending that has no long-run effect on unemployment. Besides, the government needs to strengthen the institutional apparatuses in the country.