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This paper investigates the impact of public expenditure on economic growth in Nigeria. In an attempt to do this time series data from 1970 to 2008 were fitted into the regression equation using various econometric techniques such as Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) unit root test, the Johansen co-integration technique and the Box-Jekins O. L. S. methodology. Empirical results affirmed that public expenditure has a positive and significant impact on economic growth in Nigeria. Public current expenditure was also found to exhibit a positive impact on growth at 10 percent significance level. While public capital expenditure albeit insignificant but showed a positive impact of growth. The study concludes that government should as a matter of policy invest heavily in public infrastructures to usher in the desired growth and development in the country.

This study examines the impact of fiscal policy and private consumption on economic growth among the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) spanning from 1988 to 2017 using the Panel Pool Mean Group. The results depicted that the government’s recurrent expenditure for growth was inversely but significant to economic growth, while capital expenditure was positively and statistically significant to explain economic growth in Nigeria. It can be seen that capital expenditure is vital for economic growth. Besides, private consumption’s negative effect on economic growth was a disconnection between economic output and private consumption. The results further showed that tax revenues in ECOWAS countries had a positive and significant influence on economic growth. Therefore, the study recommends re-visit government policy(ies) channeling government spending to increase ECOWAS output rates and spur regional economic growth.

The question of whether remittances and foreign aid at the macro level impact private consumption in SSA has been explored in this study. Twenty-nine (29) SSA countries were sampled for the study from 2002 to 2017. The System Generalized Method of Moment (SGMM) estimator was applied in the study to account for the dynamics in the model. Empirical evidence showed that foreign aid and remittances exerted positive but insignificant impact on private consumption.

The literature on the nexus between trade openness, income inequality and poverty appears conspicuously and of diverse outcomes. Perhaps, the mixed findings may be attributed to the methodology and economic structure of the country in view. The current study examines the trade openness on income inequality and poverty in Nigeria between 1981 and 2019 using Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) methodology. Our findings show that trade openness had different effects on inequality and poverty in Nigeria in the short and long run. While its relationship with inequality is a short-run phenomenon, it had a long-run relationship with poverty. Overall, trade openness had a declining effect on inequality and poverty. In the former, its impact was not statistically significant. However, the gains of trade openness on inequality and poverty were reversed when inequality influenced trade openness. In essence, with the influence of inequality, trade openness had an increasing effect on poverty. As a result, this study makes several recommendations to policymakers. To begin, a policy framework must be established to ensure that Nigerian trade is integrated with the rest of the world. Evidence from this study has suggested that policies such as restricting trade through border closures must not feature as a policy option as long as one of the goals of the economy is poverty reduction and reduction in inequality.