Abstract

This study investigated the influence of government defence and security expenditures on economic growth in Nigeria using annual time series data for the period 1981-2021. The study used government recurrent and capital defence expenditures, and as well as government recurrent and capital internal security expenditures as the main explanatory variables. The Autoregressive Distributive Lag approach was used to analyze the data. The results revealed that the shares of government recurrent defence expenditures in GDP and recurrent internal security expenditures in GDP had negative and insignificant impact on economic growth. The share of government capital defence expenditure in GDP had positive and insignificant impact on economic growth. Similarly, the share of government capital internal security expenditures in GDP had a positive but insignificant impact on economic growth. The study recommends that government should encourage the adequate implementation of the budgetary provision for defence and internal security expenditures, and also that government should device a means to technologically monitor the disbursement of funds for national defence and internal security in the fight against the security challenges.

Key words: National Defence, Internal Security, Economic Growth, Capital Expenditure, Recurrent Expenditure. JEL Classisification: H50, H56

Article Language: EnglishTurkish