SUSTAINABLE FISCAL MANAGEMENT IN NIGERIA – A TRIANGULATION ANALYSIS

This study examines sustainable fiscal management in Nigeria for the period 1970- 2011. Going by the proliferations of investigation techniques in the empirical literature due to the multi-dimensional nature of fiscal sustainability, we employed a barrage of tests such as the descriptive statistics, threshold parameters, unit-root and co-integration tests to, on the one hand, ascertain if fiscal sustainability holds in Nigeria and, on the other hand, cover the gap in empirical literature where these investigations were undertaken exclusively. Our results show that fiscal policy is both strongly and weakly unsustainable in Nigeria; given the disaggregated components of government expenditure. Although sustainability is attained between capital expenditure and government revenue but the government has to contend with liquidity problems since the growth of capital expenditure is higher than that of its revenue counterpart. More so, the fiscal operations of government remained cyclically intoned with changing policies and regimes in Nigeria. Despite the existence of fiscal rules as enunciated in the Fiscal Responsibility Bill (FRB) and various constitutional provisions; the sustainability of fiscal policies in Nigeria still remains elusive. This suggests that the mere existence of fiscal rules does not guarantee its sustainability.