THE NEXUS BETWEEN HUMAN CAPITAL AND INCOME INEQUALITY: THE NIGERIAN EXPERIENCE

The study examines the relationship between human capital and income inequality in Nigeria from 1981 to 2019. The study made use of secondary data and the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test estimation technique to analyze the data. The variables used in the analysis include income inequality, tertiary education enrolment, secondary school enrolment, government health expenditure, inflation rate, employment rate and gdp per capita. The results of the findings showed that one-year lagged income inequality and secondary school enrolment are both significant at the 5% level. In the long run, tertiary education enrolment, secondary school enrolment, government expenditure on health and employment rate are all statistically significant at the 1% level. Thus, in the long run, all the indicators of human capital are significant drivers of income inequality in Nigeria. Notwithstanding, of all the indicators, only tertiary school enrolment is negatively related to income inequality, as expected. The implication is that, in Nigeria, it is tertiary school enrolment that significantly lowers income inequality. Sequel to the finding in respect of the importance of tertiary school enrolment, it is recommended that policy makers continually support enrolment to tertiary schools in order to continuously witness significant declines in income inequality in Nigeria

Stock Market and Economic Growth in Nigeria

This study investigates the short run effect, long run effect and causal relationship between stock market and economic growth in Nigeria. The Augmented Dickey Fuller unit root test, Ordinary Least Squares, Johansen Cointegration test and Pairwise granger causality methods were applied to the variables. The OLS result showed that the all share index had a significant but negative relationship with economic growth; The Johansen cointegration test showed that a long run relationship exists between the stock market performance and economic growth in Nigeria in the long run while the Granger causality test results showed that stock market performance does not granger cause economic growth but economic growth granger causes stock market performance at 5 percent significance level. The study suggested some of the possible reasons for the negative impact of stock market on the Nigerian economic growth and recommended that efforts should be made to improve the stock market performance to have a positive effect on the real gross domestic product of Nigeria overtime