Education and Health as Siamese Twins in Nigeria’s Economic Development

Abstract

The study examined the effect of education and health as Siamese twins’ indicators of human capital (HC) in the economic development process in Nigeria. The imperativeness of HC in Nigeria becomes out-sound when such uprising like education standard, quality of graduates, tertiary institution ranking, standard of medical facilities, rising diseases/infections, rate of infant mortality, low life expectancy and access to medical service per thousand etc are considered. This study therefore seeks to question the efforts of government in contributing to transform these sectors and seek to know which sector impact more on economic growth in Nigeria. Annual data on education, health and economic output with the dynamics of both descriptive and econometric methods from 1981-2010 were used. The descriptive analysis showed that health and education effort by the government were inconsistent with expectation until the nations’ democratic dispensation where a progressive efforts were evident in HC development. With innovation in the endogenous growth model, the OLS regression showed that the education growth contributes significantly to on economic growth rate in Nigeria within the study period while the health growth rate negatively relating to economic growth rate though at a non-significant level in Nigeria economy. Conclusively, both education and health are germane to economic growth but education impacted more in Nigeria and no effort exerted will be too much. The government and private sector are therefore implored to invest in education and health-related areas for healthy economic transformation in Nigeria.

Keywords: Education, Health, Human Capital, Complementarity, Economic Growth and Government