Life Expectancy, Public Healthcare Expenditure and Economic Growth: The Nigerian experience

Abstract

This study focused on the long-run relationship among Nigeria’s public healthcare expenditure, life expectancy and economic growth. It adopts the use of time series between years 1981 and 2021. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method was used for estimating the relationship among the variables. From the empirical output, the variables exhibit long run relationship. A negative relationship was established between economic growth and government healthcare expenditure; and a positive and direct relationship between economic growth and life expectancy. In addition, both healthcare expenditure and life expectancy are significant variables in the Nigerian context. Therefore, it is suggested that government should commit more funds to the health sector, and proper health orientation should be given to the populace to heighten their knowledge about health. Alongside these, adoption of policies that ensures total provision of investment in healthcare infrastructures should be maintained.