The Role of Foreign-Aid-To-Health in Public Health Expenditure Impact on Economic Growth in Nigeria: An Interactive Term Approach

Public health expenditure is one of the important subsets of government expenditure used by governments in affecting the standard of living of their citizens, with Nigeria not left out. This is because health is seen as a channel through which human capital base of an economy can be improved. However, as the world is now a global village, it suffices to say that an outbreak/existence of disease in a country is an imminent spread of such diseases somewhere else in the globe. A vivid instance of this is the ravaging Covid-19 that has become a global pandemic. On this notion of preventing the spread and eradicating diseases and sicknesses, governments of developed worlds play important roles in granting health aids to the developing nation. It is on record that Nigeria has received robust foreign health aids from developed nations such as US, UK, France and so on, which might have helped in not only adding to her public health spending but also assisting in stimulating economic growth. However, debate still rages on whether the role of foreign aid is positive and effective in achieving the intentions of the foreign donors in helping boost the recipients’ countries public health expenditure and economic growth or not. This research work therefore tries to mainly investigate the role of foreign health aid in public health expenditure-economic growth impact in Nigeria between 1980 and 2020 with the use of an interactive term and timeseries data sourced from OECD-DAC and CBN Statistical Bulletin. The time series data were analysed with the aid of the EVIEWS 10 package and the results presented. The result of the analysis reveals that foreign aid to health is individually statistically significant playing positive role in Nigeria’s economy but jointly statistically insignificant with public health expenditure.