Investing in education and healthcare is one of the suggested ways the poor can escape from poverty, if properly targeted. The two sectors (education and heaathcare) in Nigeria have experienced various forms of subsidies but surprisingly, the poverty situation in Nigeria aside from deepening has been severe, pervasive and multi-dimensional with the female folk mostly affected by all counts. Based on the above argument, the study assessed how equitably public expenditure in education and healthcare have been well targeted by gender. The study employed the welfare dominance tests to determine the incidence of expenditure and how subsidy has been beneficial to men and women alike. The study found that primary education was absolutely progressive for both sexes while primary healthcare subsidies were just progressive. Interestingly, secondary education was only progressive for female while tertiary education and healthcare for both male and female were regressive and not pro poor.
People routinely expect their government through public policy to reduce poverty and inequality, and public spending is one way a policy maker works towards achieving such important task. Education and healthcare provision have been suggested as key sectors that help every policy maker achieve the above objective. The study evaluated public spending efforts in reducing inequality and poverty at all levels of these two sectors using the Benefit Incidence Analysis (BIA) in Nigeria. Findings from the study suggest that primary education and healthcare were more pro-poor in absolute terms than tertiary education and healthcare. Secondary education and healthcare reveal mixed results, while the findings suggest location bias in benefits from public spending for both education and healthcare. The study findings therefore, imply that subsidising government services can have more positive effect on income distribution if properly done than direct consumption or income transfers.
Using aggregate data from 31 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries covering periods from 1982 to 2017, this study examines the notion that the level of product complexity is a good determinant of economic growth in the long run. We use the impulse-response function (IRF) computed from the consistent generalized method of moment panel vector autoregressive (GMM pVAR) model to estimate the response of the real output growth to a change in the economic complexity index. The IRF shows that the economic complexity index has a significant impact on economic growth; a 1 standard deviation shock to the economic complexity index at time 0 contributes around 2.34 percentage points to the average rate of growth of output within the first period. The point estimates are positive and significant up to the third period. The cumulative IRF shows that the aggregate impact on economic growth is about 4.4% in the long run. Compared to some widely used innovation proxies such as the gross expenditure on research and development and secondary school enrollment, the economic complexity index performs relatively better in our model in determining economic growth in the long run.
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