DOES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH FOLLOW WAGNER’S LAW IN NIGERIA?

While previous studies to test Wagner’s hypothesis for Nigeria usedtotal government expenditure, this paper in addition to total government expenditure used adisaggregated government expenditure data from 1961 - 2007, specifically; expenditure ongeneral administration and that of community and social services to determine the specificgovernment expenditure that economic growth may have significant impact on. Economicconditions and policies change implying that it is not only economic growth that can affectgovernment expenditure hence the inclusion of other fiscal policy variable and politicalfreedom to augment the functional form of Wagner’s law. All the variables used were found tobe I(1) and long run relationship exist between the dependent and the independent variablesexcept in the case where only GDP was used as the independent variable. Wagner’s hypothesisdoes not hold in all the estimations rather Keynesian hypothesis was validated in all theestimation. Elasticity estimates and Granger causality results are in agreement

Clement A.U. Ighodaro_Infrastructure and Agricultural Growth in Nigeria

The study considered infrastructure and agricultural growth in Nigeria using a time series data for over four decades and the Parsimonious Error Correction Model estimation technique. It was found that various performance indicators with respect to physical infrastructure used for the study have not been encouraging in Nigeria. The provision of infrastructure in Nigeria, particularly physical infrastructure is characterized by the predominance of public enterprises except for telecommunications sector in recent time. The empirical part of the study revealed different relative response rates of the different component of infrastructure used in the study to the growth of the agricultural sector in Nigeria. There was unidirectional causality between telecommunication facilities and agricultural production. The same result was found between labour and agricultural production. It was recommended that the sectoral specific effects of the various forms of infrastructure should be taken into consideration when designing policy for promoting agricultural growth in Nigeria