An investigation of causal relation between public debt and economic growth in Nigeria

Abstract

Economic growth has been described as sustained increase in per capita national output or net national product over a long period of time. Public debt is the total amount of disbursed funds and contractual liabilities of residents of a country to repay principal and other related obligations to non-residents meanwhile public debt by and large refers to total national debt, also include the debt owed by states, provinces and municipalities/local government. Meanwhile granger causality was employed for this study as the estimator techniques. The data covered the period of 1970 – 2019, sources of data were obtained from Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Annual Statistical Bulletin and index mundi. The study concluded that there exists positive significance causal relationship between public debt and economic growth unidirectional coming from the Economic Growth to Public Debt which means that economic growth can be achieved if the Public Debt is increased and he suggested that More ways of achieving economic growth.