Causal Linkage amongst Public Expenditure on Health, Health Status and Growth: New Empirical Evidence from Toda-Yamamoto Approach for Nigeria

This study investigates the causal linkages amongst public expenditure on health, health status and economic growth in Nigeria using the Toda-Yamamoto technique. The choice of the Toda-Yamamoto approach is predicated on its simplicity and the ability to overcome the shortcomings inherent in the conventional causality procedures by producing more robust results through the estimation of the augmented VAR that guarantees the asymptotic distribution of the Wald statistic. To this end, the study collected annual time series data from the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Statistical bulletin and the World Development Indicator on public expenditure on health, life expectancy, infant mortality and real gross domestic product spanning 38 years from 1981 to 2018. The result of the study’s empirical analysis based on the co-integration test indicates that public health expenditure, health status and economic growth have long-run association. Further, the Toda-Yamamoto causality test result reveals the absence of causality between health expenditure and health status. Similarly, health status and economic growth are not causally interdependent. On the basis of the findings, the paper vehemently concludes that efforts to stimulate economic growth by targeting health outcomes improvement through public expenditure will be futile. As such, there is the need to develop better national health policy and programmes such as compulsory national health insurance that is capable of resolving the fundamental problems in the health sector. This would help integrate healthcare into the mainstream of the Nigerian economy.