Political instability and economic growth in Nigeria

Abstract

Using annual data spanning from 1984 to 2020, the study analysed the effect of political instability on economic growth in Nigeria. To explore both the short and long-run relationship, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique is used. The cointegration test shows that political instability and economic growth are cointegrated. In the short run, the finding indicated that political instability negatively impacted economic growth. Likewise, in the long-run, political instability harms economic growth. Government expenditure contributed to economic growth in the short-run and long-run. Gross capital formation and financial development have detrimental effect on economic growth. Based on the findings from this study, there is a need for the government to address the frequent political instability to achieve the expected long-term growth in the economy.