Public Sector Investment on Human Capital and Sustainable Development in Nigeria

In recent years, the link between public sector investment in human capital and sustainable development has gained increasing attention. However, despite various policy interventions, Nigeria continues to grapple with persistent challenges associated with human capital development, particularly in education and healthcare. These deficiencies hindered progress in achieving sustainable development and have motivated the investigation into the direction of causality and the impact of public sector investment in human capital on sustainable development in Nigeria from 1980 to 2021. The Granger causality test and Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimation techniques were used. The findings revealed that government investment in health and education positively influenced sustainable development. The results indicated a unidirectional causality from sustainable development to educational expenditure and a bidirectional causality between sustainable development and government expenditure on health. Based on these findings, the study recommended that the Nigerian government prioritize sustained investment in education and healthcare services to promote sustainable development.