The Moderating Roles of Government in Poverty Reduction in Nigeria

Sunday Ijuo Ukpata,Rinret Winifred Lukden,Akuraun Shedrach Iyortsuun,Jacob Sesugh Angahar

doi:10.14738/abr.612.5027

Abstract

This paper examined “The Moderating Roles of Government in Poverty Reduction in Nigerian” The paper critically evaluated the impact of government intervention in alleviating poverty in Nigeria.. It further addresses the issues of how these interventions programmes have proved to have been successful or have failed over time. The objective was to determine if there is statistically significant relationship between government expenditure on various poverty reduction programmes and economic growth in Nigeria. This we based our theoretical foundation on the Kuznet’s U Curve Hypothesis and the general income distribution theory to evaluate the link between inequality, poverty reduction and economic growth in Nigeria. In the methodology, our Model Specification was anchored on whether government programs has any significant influence on poverty reduction following the framework of Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1995) and Grootaert, Kanbbdur and Oh (1995) methods of analysis that uses a time subscript (t). We therefore modeled the relationship between poverty reduction and government programs through government expenditure on social intervention programs. The finding shows that there is no statistical significance between government expenditure and poverty reduction programs in Nigeria.

Highlights

Poverty problem in the sub-Saharan Africa is an aged long issues that African governments and leaders have been challenged to tackle headlong over time
To the state of the developing world the major growing concern was basically on the relationship between economic growth and income distribution. This is adduced to the fact, since many of the developed countries had experienced economic growth rates above their historical standards have realized that such growth seemed to have affected the income distribution negatively leading to increased inequality and a failure to eliminate or even reduce the level of poverty, (Todaro, 1994 and Gallo, 2002)
EMPIRICAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS Unit Root Tests Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) test was employed to test for the stationarity or otherwise of the time series used in the model estimation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Poverty problem in the sub-Saharan Africa is an aged long issues that African governments and leaders have been challenged to tackle headlong over time. To the state of the developing world the major growing concern was basically on the relationship between economic growth and income distribution This is adduced to the fact, since many of the developed countries had experienced economic growth rates above their historical standards have realized that such growth seemed to have affected the income distribution negatively leading to increased inequality and a failure to eliminate or even reduce the level of poverty, (Todaro, 1994 and Gallo, 2002). The null hypothesis in ADF which states that the series are non-stationary (i.e. the series has unit root) is tested using the ADF and the results are presented in Table 1 below: Variables

ECM term

Critical Value

Inequality Among the MPI Poor

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS