Public Sector expenditure and poverty alleviation in Nigeria: implications for Economic Growth

This study examined the impact of public sector expenditure in the Nigerian economy. The study period covers 1990 to 2022. The study attempt to examine relevant variables such as Internal Revenue Generated, Government Recurrent Expenditure, Debt Financing, Government Capital Expenditure and Gross Domestic Product. With the application of Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, the outcome of study reveals that government Debt Financing, government capital expenditure and government capital expenditure, Internal Generated Revenue all have a significant impact on the GDP. Conversely, government recurrent expenditure i.e governance and administrative cost have an insignificant impact on GDP. The result further showed that public sector expenditure and financing play fundamental role in impacting the level of productivity in the country. Following from the outcome of the study, it is recommended that: Government Expenditure should give priority attention to capital and public investments by making them of higher proportion in gross government expenditure, thereby creating more business investment, job and enhancing the quality of public spending and the attainment of measurable growth and development.