ANALYSIS OF THE INFLATIONARY IMPACT OF GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE IN NIGERIA THROUGH THE LENS OF DYNAMIC ARDL AND KRLS METHODS

With inflation rate at the wrong side of 20%, the need to tackle the high rate of inflation in Nigeria prompted the researchers to investigate the inflationary effect of government expenditure in the country using time series data for the period 1981-2022. To ensure a more robust investigation, we disaggregated government expenditure into the recurrent and capital components. Preliminary unit root tests using Augmented Dickey-Fuller, Phillips Perron, and Zivot-Andrews methods indicated that the variables of the study have mixed orders of integration, namely, zero and one. First, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) Bounds test result indicated that the variables have a long-run relationship. Secondly, we employed the Kernel-based regularized least squares (KRLS) method which transcends functional form argument to estimate the relationship. Results from the ARDL method revealed that a percentage increase in government recurrent expenditure results in a 3.89% increase in inflation rate in the long run and the result from the KRLS method indicated an increase of 4.63% in inflation. However, a percentage increase in government capital expenditure results in a 1.6% decline in inflation rate in Nigeria in the long run from the ARDL result, and a 5.6% decrease in the KRLS result. The study concludes that inflation is a fiscal phenomenon in Nigeria but it can be tamed by deliberately increasing capital spending over recurrent expenditure. The federal government of Nigeria should cut down on its recurrent spending, for instance, by reducing the cost of governance which is gulping the yearly national budget. Also, the Nigerian government should raise its capital spending above the level of recurrent expenditure to force the inflation rate down.