Effect of health on economic growth in Nigeria: an application of the ARDL model
International Journal of Development Research
Effect of health on economic growth in Nigeria: an application of the ARDL model
Received 28th September, 2020 Received in revised form 26th October, 2020 Accepted 19th November, 2020 Published online 30th December, 2020
Copyright © 2020, Ogunbadejo Hussain Kehinde et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The paper empirically investigates the effect of health on economic growth from 1970 to 2017, using Autoregressive Re-Distributed Lag (ARDL). Life expectancy at birth was used as a proxy for health and real capital GDP as a proxy for economic growth. The results suggest that infant mortality rate decreases economic growth in both the short and the long-run and both statistically significant at 1% level. While better health improves economic performance, it follows from the positive and significant relationship between health and economic growth in the short and long run. Accordingly, the health sector should be considered as a prime sector by policy makers in the decision to allocate resources for development as it is pivotal to other sectors’ development.
