Public Health Expenditure and Poverty in Nigeria
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The study examined public health expenditure and poverty in Nigeria from 1980 to 2015. The main objective of the study was to examine the impact of public health expenditure on poverty in Nigeria. The data for the study were sourced from CBN statistical bulletin and World Bank World Development Indicator. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller test and Autoregressive Distributed Lag model were used as the main analytical tools. The ADF unit test result revealed stationarity of the variables at order zero and one, which satisfied the requirement to employ the ARDL Bounds testing approach. The ARDL Bounds test revealed the existence of long run relationship among the variables. Moreover, the result revealed that government capital and recurrent expenditure on health have positive but insignificant relationship with poverty in Nigeria both in the short run and long run. Employment rate has a positive and insignificant relationship with poverty in the long run. While in the short run, employment rate has a positive and significant relationship with poverty in Nigeria. The study concluded that public health expenditure has not significantly contributed to the reduction of poverty in Nigeria. Therefore, government should increase its health care expenditure to assist people living below poverty line in Nigeria including the provision of free basic health care.