Human Capital Outcome, Industrialization and Unemployment in Nigeria
Keywords:
Human Capital Outcome, Industrialization, Population Growth, Gdp Per Capita, Unemployment Rate, ARDLAbstract
The role of human capital outcome and industrialization in addressing the unemployment issue in developing countries has been debated in limited studies. Against this background, the study examines the impact of human capital outcomes and industrialization on unemployment rate in Nigeria ranging from 1991 to 2024. The study employed Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) techniques to achieve the objective of the study. The variables considered were unemployment as the dependent variable while human capital outcomes, industrialization, gross domestic product per capita and population growth are the independent variables. Data was sourced from World Bank Development Indicator 2024. To measure the human capital outcome, we used three proxy variables i.e., enrolment rate, life expectancy and literacy rate. The study ascertained the stationarity of the time series properties of the study, using Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF). The result of unit root test revealed that human capital outcome, industrialization and population growth were stationary at first difference I(1), while for unemployment rate and gross domestic product per capita was found stationary at level form, I(0). The findings revealed that human capital outcome had a negative but significant impact on unemployment in Nigeria in the short term. The result further reveals that gross domestic product per capita had a negative and insignificant effect on unemployment in Nigeria. Further, industrialization had a positive and significant effect on unemployment rate in Nigeria. Also, population growth exerts a negative and statistically insignificant effect on unemployment in Nigeria. Lastly, the estimated Error Correction Term (ECT) of -2.681920 indicates the speed at which the model returns to equilibrium as 26.8%. The study, therefore recommended that government should review and modernize school curricula at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels to align with emerging labor-market demands.
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