DOES HEALTH EXPENDITURE IMPACTS ON ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NIGERIA?

A nation with healthy people is considered a wealthy nation. This study is designed to evaluate the impact of health expenditure on education attainment and economic growth in Nigeria. Most empirical studies in literature pay little or no attention to this area but majorly focus on how people achieve better health when there is economic growth. This could be as a result of the general consensus that economic growth leads to improved health status while the attention was not given to whether causality exists in the reverse direction. This study is carried out to breach this gap. Autoregressive conditional Heteroskedasticity regression analysis was employed and the result shows that health expenditures and education attainment are important determinants of economic growth in Nigeria while life expectancy rate has negative impact on growth for the period covered by the study. As a result, the following policy measures are suggested among others that government should encourage education attainment through improve education spending in the economy, increase expenditures on health provisions, induce the level of education attainment and place priority on improve health spending to enhance economic growth.