Impact of internal security expenditure on economic growth in Nigeria

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the federal government has continually increased the spending on internal security in order to improve the security situation and promote economic growth in Nigeria. Despite the increases in internal security spending, the insecurity in Nigeria has continued to worsen. The study therefore examined how the spending on internal security affected the growth of Nigeria's economy from 1981 to 2021. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model technique was adopted for estimation. The ARDL bound test for cointegration result revealed the existence of long-run relationship among the variables. Results from the ARDL model showed that an increase in government capital expenditure on internal security led to significant rise in Real Gross Domestic Product in the short-run and long-run. In contrast, an increase in government recurrent expenditure on internal security led to significant fall in Real Gross Domestic Product in the short-run but a significant rise in Real Gross Domestic Product in the long-run. The study concluded that government capital expenditure on internal security has positive and significant impact on Nigerian economy both in the short-run and longrun, while government recurrent expenditure on internal security has a negative and significant impact on Nigerian economy in the short-run but a positive and significant impact on Nigerian economy in the long-run. The study recommended that the Nigerian Government should procure more security hardware for the internal security agencies in order to adequately equip them, as well as take drastic measures to ensure the judicious utilization of the recurrent internal security expenditure.