adegbolaayeni/Economics-Education-and-Unemployment-in-Nigeria

# 📚 Economics Education as a Tool for Combating Unemployment in Nigeria > **Education Economics | Labour Market | ARDL Econometrics | Human Capital | Nigeria** --- ## 🔍 Overview This repository presents an empirical investigation into whether **economics education significantly reduces unemployment in Nigeria**, using **35 years of annual time series data (1990–2024)** and an **Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing framework**. The study addresses a critical paradox: Nigeria has simultaneously expanded tertiary education enrolment and experienced persistently high youth unemployment — raising fundamental questions about curriculum quality, public funding adequacy, and structural labour market barriers. --- ## 📋 Abstract Three econometric models examine the economics education–unemployment nexus: - **Model 1 (ARDL):** Impact of educational attainment on unemployment - **Model 2 (ARDL):** Education's contribution to employment creation and self-reliance - **Model 3 (OLS):** Macroeconomic challenges as moderators of education's employment returns **Core Findings:** - ✅ **H₀₁ Rejected:** Educational attainment significantly reduces unemployment long-run (β = −0.156, p = 0.028) - ✅ **H₀₂ Rejected:** Education significantly promotes employment creation (β = +0.167, p = 0.027) - ⚠️ **H₀₃ Partially Rejected:** Macroeconomic challenges (inflation, population growth) moderate education's employment returns (F = 5.489, p = 0.002) - 🔑 **Government education expenditure** has the strongest long-run effect of all variables (β = −0.892 on unemployment; β = +0.945 on employment) - 📉 Nigeria's education spending averages **0.61% of GDP** — critically below the UNESCO benchmark of **6%** --- ## 🧮 Methodology ### Data Sources | Source | Variables Covered | |---|---| | World Bank Development Indicators (WDI) | GDP growth, educational attainment, inflation, population growth | | ILO – ILOSTAT | Unemployment rate | | UNESCO Institute for Statistics | Government …