Yusuf Abdulkarim, Mohd Saidatulakmal
Department of Economics, Nigeria Police Academy, Kano Maiduguri Road, Wudil, Kano Nigeria.
Department of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Gelugor, Malaysia.
SN Bus Econ. 2023;3(4):88. doi: 10.1007/s43546-023-00468-7. Epub 2023 Mar 9.
The COVID-19 pandemic induced governments all over the world to momentarily accumulate higher levels of public debt in order to invest in deficit spending and social protection programs to tackle the anticipated economic slump. The Nigerian government has borrowed heavily from domestic and foreign sources in order to resolve the growing budget deficits and return the economy to a sustainable growth trajectory. Previous studies frequently made the incorrect assumption that the relationship between public debt and growth is linear and symmetric, leading to empirical results that is frequently disputed and imprecise. This study's main objective is to examine the asymmetric impact of public debt on economic growth in Nigeria from 1980 to 2020 using the Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag method. Empirical evidence indicated that external debt have a significant positive and symmetric impact on economic growth in the long and short run, while debt service payment supporting the debt overhang hypothesis activated a symmetric effect that stifle growth. Domestic debt retarded growth asymmetrically in the short term and linearly over the long term. Foreign reserve holding, on the other hand, had an asymmetric long-run influence and a symmetric short-run impact on growth motivation. To mitigate the negative effects of unsustainable public debt, the study advocated for fiscal reforms that effectively reduce deficit financing to keep the level of government debt low and be able to respond robustly to an economic shock, improve domestic revenue generation and infrastructure spending, and strengthen governance practices and institutions.
新冠疫情促使世界各国政府暂时积累更高水平的公共债务，以便进行赤字支出投资和实施社会保护计划，以应对预期的经济衰退。尼日利亚政府已大量从国内外举债，以解决不断增长的预算赤字问题，并使经济回归可持续增长轨道。以往的研究常常错误地假设公共债务与经济增长之间的关系是线性且对称的，从而得出经常受到争议且不准确的实证结果。本研究的主要目的是运用非线性自回归分布滞后方法，考察1980年至2020年公共债务对尼日利亚经济增长的不对称影响。实证证据表明，外债在长期和短期内对经济增长具有显著的正向且对称的影响，而支持债务积压假说的偿债支付产生了抑制增长的对称效应。国内债务在短期内对经济增长产生不对称的抑制作用，在长期内则呈线性抑制作用。另一方面，外汇储备持有量对增长动力在长期具有不对称影响，在短期内具有对称影响。为减轻不可持续公共债务的负面影响，该研究主张进行财政改革，有效减少赤字融资，以保持政府债务水平较低，并能够有力应对经济冲击，增加国内财政收入和基础设施支出，加强治理实践和制度建设。
