Are Determinants of Government Expenditure Symmetry or Asymmetry? Fresh Evidence from Nigeria

Abstract

Nigeria government has been playing the role of internalizing economic externalities, dealing with issue of unemployment and overall welfare of the populace. However, in the presence of huge and rising government expenditure, unemployment, and inflation rate still persist. This therefore called for a revisit of what determines government expenditure. There are three issues yet unresolved in the debate of what drives government expenditure. These are omitted variables bias, aggregation bias and asymmetry issue. To deal with aggregation bias, we focus on the components of government expenditure, that is, capital and recurrent. To address the issue of asymmetry, nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag was employed. Data are obtained for relevant variables spanning 1981–2021. Model of government expenditure developed by Peacock and Wiseman (1961) combined with Devarajan et al (1996) and Giavazzi, et al (2000) models are utilized. The following results are obtained. First, government capital expenditure is countercyclical while recurrent expenditure is procyclical. Second, some drivers of government expenditure, such as exchange rate and oil price, exhibit asymmetry behavior. Asymmetric tax revenue shows potential to drive capital expenditure but significantly and positively influences recurrent expenditure. Asymmetric behavior of oil revenue and exchange rate also engenders capital expenditure. However, asymmetric behavior of degree of openness and inflation rate negatively affects capital expenditure. Asymmetric behavior of tax revenue and oil revenue posted positive effect while exchange rate and degree of openness have negative effect on recurrent expenditure. Period of election is also a strong positive determinant of recurrent expenditure both in the short and long run. Following the nature of cyclicality of the component of government expenditure, the priority of government could be on capital expenditure since it will provide essential public goods required for the economy to flourish. Bearing in mind that oil revenue is volatile, it is imperative for government to rely more on tax revenue than oil revenue. Engaging in forward exchange rate might be appropriate to deal with any possible exchange rate fluctuation.