Abstract

Inflationary tendencies of public debt have been the cause of an unsettling debate among policymakers in Nigeria. Using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework, this study attempts to investigate the impact of total public debt on inflation in Nigeria for the period 1983–2018. The cointegrating regression results reveal evidence of a stable long-run relationship among inflation, total public debt, money supply, interest rate, economic growth, trade openness, and private investment in the presence of structural breaks. Empirical results show that the impact of public debt on inflation is statistically insignificant, irrespective of whether the regression was in the short or the long run. Hence, the study concludes that inflation in Nigeria could be driven by other factors other than public debt.

摘要

公共债务的通胀趋势一直是尼日利亚决策者之间令人不安的辩论的原因。本研究使用自回归分布式滞后 (ARDL) 框架，试图调查 1983 年至 2018 年期间尼日利亚公共债务总额对通货膨胀的影响。协整回归结果表明，在存在结构性断裂的情况下，通货膨胀、公共债务总额、货币供应量、利率、经济增长、贸易开放度和私人投资之间存在稳定的长期关系。实证结果表明，无论回归是短期还是长期，公共债务对通货膨胀的影响在统计上都不显着。因此，该研究得出结论，尼日利亚的通货膨胀可能是由公共债务以外的其他因素驱动的。