Public Sector Education Investment and Manufacturing Output in Nigeria: Empirics and Policy Options

Given the importance of manufacturing sector as a key driver of economic growth, this paper examines public sector education investment and manufacturing output in Nigeria. The study employed Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) unit root test and Ordinary Least Square (OLS) technique to analyse the relationship between public educational spending, primary school enrolment rate, per capita income, exchange rate, foreign direct investment and manufacturing output growth. The study revealed that that public education spending has a positive but insignificant effect on manufacturing output growth in Nigeria. The study recommends among other things, that government should target education spending in ways that favour manufacturing industry growth. Keywords: Education spending, manufacturing output, economic development JEL Classification: H52, I25, L

Socio-Economic Determinants of Academic Performances in Aguata Local Government Area, Anambra State

Education is regarded as the greatest investment that any nation can make for the development of its human and material resources. This paper investigated the socio-economic determinants of academic performance in Aguata local government area, Anambra state. The study made use of a qualitative response regression model to analyze the participant’s responses obtained through a well-structured questionnaire. The study presents some interesting findings. The ML-Binary logit estimation results show that parental income (PI); number of hours of study (NHS); parent educational achievement (PEA) and power supply (PS) have positive and significant impact on student’s academic performance (AP), family size (FS) has a negative and significant impact on student’s academic performance (AP) whereas residential area (RA) has positive and insignificant impact on academic performance. The correlation results show that all the variables except family size are positively correlated with student’s academic performance. The study therefore recommends that since parental income is a very important variable which influences student’s academic performance; government employment initiatives should be strengthened while those that are not effective should be reviewed. Government’s effort to boost power supply should be intensified beyond mere transfer of ownership to the private sector. Epileptic power supply does not augur well with the academic performances of students as the finding of this study has shown. Key words: Education, Academic performance, Anambra State. JEL Classification: P17, H4, H