Using the Autoregressive Distribute Lag (ARDL) and Granger Causality approach, we re-examined how the standard of living of the citizens are affected by the expenditure pattern of the Federal Government of Nigeria from 1981 to 2018. The outcome of the study based on data applied revealed that government expenditure has significant effect on the standard of living of her citizens. To our dismay, this is not the reality on ground as the level of poverty in country is high: the rich are getting richer, whereas the poor are getting poorer. There are deaths of basic infrastructures coupled with abandoned capital projects by past administrations. Those at the helm of affairs are interested in personal and political interest at the detriment of the welfare of the citizens. With the high volatility in inflation rate in the macro economy, we urge the government to increase salaries and wages of workers to cushion it devastative effect on purchasing power. There is overwhelming need for the government to continue channeling resources to the social sector within its life betterment programme such as pension, social securities, etc. to significantly reduce poverty to improve per capita income because reduction in poverty translate to higher per capita income thus better standard of living.

Purpose: This paper presents an analysis of the effect of non-oil exports on the manufacturing sector growth in an oil-rich country in Africa – Nigeria from 1986 to 2018. In clear terms, we evaluated how manufacturing sector capacity utilization is affected by non-oil exports. Methods: The Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimation technique was applied in estimating the model and was lagged by two years. The long-run relationship was determined using the traditional Johansen co-integration methodology. How manufacturing sector growth is affected by non-oil exports was evaluated using the Granger Causality technique. The Augmented Dicky-Fuller (ADF) and Phillips-Perron tests were applied to check the stationarity properties of the data. Results: The growth in the manufacturing sector in Nigeria has not been significantly affected by non-oil export despite the various non-oil export promotion strategies initiated by the government. Implication: A major implication of the finding is that the cost and access to financial services for non-oil exporters should be reduced or relaxed by the Central Bank of Nigeria. High-interest rates charged by commercial banks and little disbursement characterized by the volume of commercial banks credit affect manufacturing firms concerning acquiring modern plants and machinery which results in a poor quality of non-oil exports.