Economic Analysis of Capital Expenditure and Infrastrucral Development in Nigeria

Infrastructural development has been the major concern of countries all over the world due to its

significant impact in fostering growth. In Nigeria, it has been observed that the level of infrastructure

posed serious threat to attaining sustained growth. This study therefore examines the impact of capital

expenditure on infrastructural development in Nigeria, utilising time series from 1970 to 2017.

The study adopted autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model due to the possibility of the past value

of the dependent variable explaining its present value, and found that capital expenditure, construction

expenditure and non-oil revenue have the potency of accentuating infrastructural development in the

long-run but such is being hampered by external debt. The positive effect of recurrent expenditure on

infrastructural development is a pointer that bulk of the expenditure in Nigeria over the years is recurrent

in nature. These suggest the need to boost non-oil revenue, reduce recurrent and channel external

debt into productive infrastructural development.