Impact of Revenue-Expenditure Gap on Economic Outputs in Kwara State

Abstract

Internally Generated Revenue has emerged in recent times as a crucial aspect of economic growth and development. Drawing from some of the recent literature on public expenditure, this study estimated the impact of revenue-expenditure gap on output in Nigeria with a case study of Kwara State. The study employed Auto-Regressive Distributed technique on data obtained from the Kwara State Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development for its analysis. The results of the study show that there has been an upward trend in the revenue-expenditure gap in Kwara State. The implication is that the government expenditure has been more than its revenue and later translated into a deficit budget for the state. The findings also indicate that this gap slows the growth of economic outputs in Kwara State. Therefore, the Nigerian government should take urgent and adequate steps to increase their internally generated revenue.