Abstract:The study investigates the effect of public health expenditure on health outcomes in Nigeria, as captured by life expectancy at birth and infant mortality rates. The result shows that public health expenditure and health outcomes have long-run equilibrium relationship. Furthermore, the results showed that an increase in public health expenditure improves life expectancy and reduces infant mortality rates. In addition, urban population and HIV prevalence rate significantly affects health outcomes, while per capita income exhibits no effect on health outcomes in Nigeria. The findings suggest that public health expenditure remains a necessary component in improving health outcomes in Nigeria.

No abstract

It has been enunciated that it is possible to reduce the size of the sacrifice ratio in an economy without a corresponding increase in the rate of inflation. Besides, for the Nigerian economy, there are issues relating to the inflationoutput relationship, among which is how inflation inertia impacts on output and unemployment. It is therefore apt to ascertain what Nigeria's sacrifice ratio could be after many successful inflation reductions over the years. Adopting the Instrumental Variables Generalized Method of Moments (IV-GMM) technique and using data from1970-2015, the findings suggest that inflation inertia has a significant negative impact on the actual rate of inflation in Nigeria. It was also revealed that the percentage of a year's real GDP that must be forgone to reduce inflation by 1 percent in Nigeria is 5.1 while 53.6 percent of output was sacrificed in 1982. Equivalently, a sacrifice of 26.6 percent of cyclical unemployment was made in the same year; while the highest percentage of GDP was sacrificed in 1990 and the lowest in 2007.

That microfinance institutions empower women has become a heated debate at both theoretical and empirical economics. A large proportion of women in developing countries are characterized by segregation, relegation, poverty, vulnerability; majority of them engaged in agriculture and related economic activities, while a few others have menial jobs. The objective of this chapter is to determine how microfinance has empowered women in Nigeria. It employed propensity score matching and logit model to estimate the effect of microfinance on women empowerment and welfare. The results show that age of women, education, belonging to saving association, and operating an account are the determinants of women empowerment and welfare as they access finance from the microfinance banks. It was also observed that there is disparity among women who have access to liquidity. It is recommended that more microfinance banks be cited in the rural sector where the majority of the poor reside, policies like low interest rates, national awareness, and incentives for more women to access micro-credits.

No abstract