Does educational investment enhance capacity development for Nigerian youths? An autoregressive distributed lag approach.

This paper employs the autoregressive distributed lag bound test and Nigerian time series data spanning 1980–2016 to provide empirical evidence on the educational financing—(youths) capacity development nexus via secondary school enrollment channel. The greatest factor that is pivotal to developing the capacity of Nigerian youths is investment in the quantity of education, and more significantly in its quality. The paper's main results show that budgetary allocation to education positively and significantly impacts secondary school enrollment, both in the long and short runs. Thererfore, the study recommends a substantial investment in the educational sector even if there has to be a trade‐off with other types of unproductive investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]