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The Relationship Between Governments’ Budgetary Allocations to Education and Educational Outcomes in Nigeria: An ARDL Approach
Subject area: Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities · Area of research: Economics and Education
Abstract
This study examined the relationship between government budgetary allocation to education and education outcomes in Nigeria from 1990 to 2024. The study employed the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique to examine both the short-run and long-run relationships among education outcomes, government education expenditure, GDP per capita, population growth and inflation. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller test established that the variables were integrated at mixed orders of I(0) and I(1), providing justification for the ARDL approach. The bounds test produced an F-statistic of 4.778, which exceeded the 5% upper-bound critical value, confirming the existence of a long-run relationship among the variables. The long-run results showed that government education expenditure had a positive but statistically insignificant relationship with education outcomes. In the short run, population growth had a positive and statistically significant effect. The error-correction coefficient was negative and statistically significant at -0.931, indicating rapid adjustment towards long-run equilibrium, with approximately 93.1% of disequilibrium corrected within one year. The study concludes that increasing education expenditure alone may not guarantee improved educational outcomes and recommends greater emphasis on efficient allocation, implementation, monitoring and accountability of education resources.
Keywords
government expenditure; education outcomes; education financing; ARDL; nigeria; population growth; education policy.
How to cite this paper
@article{1722643,
author = {Dr. C.O.K Ibidapo, O.A. Akinmuyisitan},
title = {The Relationship Between Governments’ Budgetary Allocations to Education and Educational Outcomes in Nigeria: An ARDL Approach},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2026},
volume = {10},
number = {2},
pages = {3087-3096},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1722643.pdf},
abstract = {This study examined the relationship between government budgetary allocation to education and education outcomes in Nigeria from 1990 to 2024. The study employed the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique to examine both the short-run and long-run relationships among education outcomes, government education expenditure, GDP per capita, population growth and inflation. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller test established that the variables were integrated at mixed orders of I(0) and I(1), providing justification for the ARDL approach. The bounds test produced an F-statistic of 4.778, which exceeded the 5% upper-bound critical value, confirming the existence of a long-run relationship among the variables. The long-run results showed that government education expenditure had a positive but statistically insignificant relationship with education outcomes. In the short run, population growth had a positive and statistically significant effect. The error-correction coefficient was negative and statistically significant at -0.931, indicating rapid adjustment towards long-run equilibrium, with approximately 93.1% of disequilibrium corrected within one year. The study concludes that increasing education expenditure alone may not guarantee improved educational outcomes and recommends greater emphasis on efficient allocation, implementation, monitoring and accountability of education resources.},
keywords = {government expenditure; education outcomes; education financing; ARDL; nigeria; population growth; education policy.},
month = {August},
}