Health, Poverty Reduction and Human Capital Development in Nigeria

Abstract

It should be noted that poverty has a strong link and two-way relationship with health: poverty makes people more vulnerable to ill-health, and ill-health tends to lead to low productivity, hence poverty. It is against this background that this study makes use of time series data from the secondary source, on Nigerian economy for the period 1980-2011, obtained primarily from the National Bureau of statistic and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Bulletin, 2010 to explain the relationship among health, poverty and economic growth. It adopts some selected variables which have been tested valid as a measurement of health status and poverty measurement. The health care spending, life expectancy rate, fertility rate are used to capture health status, GDP per capita is used to measure the standard of living per head in Nigeria and unemployment rate to measure the level of poverty reduction in the economy while real GDP is used to capture economic growth. The results show that relationship between GDP per capital growth and the level of gross domestic is positive which satisfies the a priori condition. That is, a change in income will bring about 0.028 percentage change in the gross domestic product overtime but the variable is statistically insignificant using the probability value. The relationship between unemployment rate and economic growth is negative satisfying the a priori and statistically significant at 5% level. An indication that an increase in unemployment rate will reduce economic growth by 0.03 percent which affirms previous literatures on effect of unemployment on growth.