INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT INTEGRITY AND PUBLIC SPENDING ON ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NIGERIA

AbstractThis paper investigates the individual and joint impacts of government integrity and public spending on economic growth in Nigeria, by using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) technique covering 1981 to 2021. It modelled the interactive effect of government integrity and fiscal spending relying on disaggregated form of the Keynesian framework. The results reveal that public expenditure has negative impact on growth in the short-run; and as such negates the Keynesian dictates. However, capital spending had significant positive impact on growth in the long-run. Surprisingly, the effect of the interaction between government integrity and public spending remained negative both in the short and long-run periods. This implies that government integrity substitutes or reduces the effect of public spending on economic growth in Nigeria within the study period. Thus, the paper recommends policies geared towards increasing and ensuring optimum implementation of capital spending on projects within the budget year. In addition, the legislature should increase their oversight functions focused on the preparation of appropriation bills, budget monitoring and implementation processes in order to enforce transparency and integrity of government officials involved at all stages of the budgeting process