Does Complementing Fiscal Capacity with Institutional Quality Accentuate Social Protection Spending? Insight from Nigeria Data.

It has been argued that extreme poverty and inequality can be reduced through proper social protection programmes. This study sought to analyze fiscal capacity, institutional quality and social protection spending in Nigeria using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bound Testing to cointegration approach. Variables such as per capita GDP, gross saving rate, inflation rate, debt service, real per capita expenditure on infrastructure were included in our model as predictors of social protection spending. Findings suggests that increase in fiscal capacity and per capita GDP accentuates social protection spending which largely depends to great extent on quality of institution.