Impact of Public Health Expenditure on the Nigerian Health Sector Performance: Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Health is a vital and crucial factor which determines the quality of human capital that enables the government to take the challenge in the areas of providing affordable and good healthcare for the citizenry through health expenditure. On the basis of this, the study examines the impact of public health expenditure on the Nigeria health sector performance beginning from 1981 to 2020 by employing Autoregressive Distributed Lag. The study ascertained stationarity of the time series properties of the variables where Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) was applied. Besides, the ARDL Bounds Test results confirmed the rejection of no long-term equilibrium relationship among the variables. The results of the Error Correction Mechanism (ECM) accentuated the connection between Public Healthcare Expenditure and Health Sector Performance in Nigeria through establishment of stable long-term equilibrium relationship among the variables employed in the model. Therefore, this study recommends not only increase in the budgetary allocation to the health sector but also establish a platform that will ensure probity and accountability in the Health Sector. This in turn leads to achieve improvement in the health sector performance necessary for building human capital in Nigeria.