Recurrent Expenditure and Human Development in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s increasing recurrent expenditure has not produced commensurate improvements in health, education and living standards, raising concerns about the effectiveness of the functional composition of public spending. This study examined the relationship between recurrent expenditure and human development in Nigeria from 1999 to 2024, with inflation included as a control variable. Human development was measured using the Human Development Index, while recurrent expenditure was disaggregated into social and community services expenditure and economic services expenditure. The study adopted a quantitative ex post facto design and utilised annual secondary data obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin and United Nations Development Programme Human Development Reports. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics, the Augmented Dickey–Fuller test and the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach. The unit-root results established a combination of I(0) and I(1) variables. The bounds-test statistic of 13.8949 exceeded the 1% upper-bound critical value of 5.966, confirming cointegration among the variables. Nevertheless, social and community services expenditure had a negative and statistically insignificant long-run relationship with human development (β = −0.0213, p = 0.7338). Economic services expenditure also exhibited a negative and insignificant relationship (β = −0.0734, p = 0.1470), while inflation produced a similarly negative and insignificant coefficient (β = −0.0047, p = 0.1172). The error-correction coefficient was negative and significant (β = −0.0690, p < 0.001), indicating that approximately 6.9% of short-run disequilibrium was corrected annually. The study concludes that the expenditure components and human development share a longrun equilibrium relationship, but neither expenditure category independently generated statistically reliable human-development gains. Recurrent allocations should therefore be linked to measurable service-delivery outcomes, supported by performance-based budgeting and protected from inflationary erosion