Addressing Youth Unemployment in Nigeria: Do Remittances and Education Matter?

Youth unemployment is a pressing socioeconomic challenge facing the Nigerian economy. This study examines the role of remittances and education in addressing youth unemployment in Nigeria from 1996 to 2023. It focuses on the mediating role of education in the relationship between remittances and youth unemployment. The study employs an autoregressive distributed lagged model (ARDL) and a Pairwise causality test on time series data. The paper revealed that in the long run, remittances and education play a significant role in decreasing youth unemployment in Nigeria. However, the interaction between them has no pronounced impact on unemployment in the long run. The causality test result indicates a unidirectional causality between education and youth unemployment, but an absence of a causal relationship between remittances and youth unemployment. Based on these outcomes, this study recommends that the Nigerian government should ensure the redirection of remittance inflows toward education, skill development, and labour-intensive sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture and services. Also, they should bridge the gaps between education and industry needs by encouraging internships, apprenticeships, and partnerships with businesses.