Trade Openness and Human Capital Investment in Nigeria (Published)
Successive administrations in Nigeria have developed a number of programmes and policies (Universal Basic Education (UBE), National Immunization Coverage Scheme (NICS), Midwives Service Scheme (MSS) and Structural Adjustment Progranme (SAP) etc.) aimed at harnessing the positive influence of trade openness on human capital investment in the country. In spite of these, human capital in Nigeria is grossly under developed. This paper examines the impact of tr\ade openness on human capital investment in Nigeria between 1981 and 2020. The study employed Vector Auto Regression (VAR) modeling techniques for the analysis. Human capital investment was proxied by total government expenditure in health and education (dependent variable) while trade openness was measured by trade openness index (explanatory variable). Per capita electricity consumption and exchange rate served as check variables. Human capital investment showed strong endogenous impact (strong influence) on its self while trade openness and per capita electricity consumption exhibited strong exogenous impact (weak influence) on human capital investment throughout the forecast period. The study recommended that, since trade openness in Nigeria is crude oil centered, government should invest more revenue from the sales of crude oil in human capital development for trade openness to have any significant impact on human capital investment in Nigeria.
Keywords: Capital, Human, Investment, Trade, openness
Capital Structure and Firm Performance Nexus: Nigerian Consumer Goods Sector Analysis (Published)
This study investigated the effect of capital structure on firm performance using a sample of seven companies listed under the consumer goods sector of the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The study adopted return on assets as proxy for performance (the response variable), while capital structure components such as debt to equity, debt to capital employed and equity to capital employed were used as the explanatory variables. Secondary data were collected from the annual published financial reports of the sampled consumer goods sector companies for the period 2009 to 2018. The study employed descriptive statistics and multiple regression technique based on the E-view 9.0 software as the methods of data analysis. The results revealed that debt to equity has insignificant positive impact on return on assets, debt to capital employed and equity to capital employed had negative but insignificant effect on return on assets. Over all, capital structure has no significant effect (at 5% level) on firm performance in the consumer goods sector. Based on the findings, the study recommended among others that the management of consumer goods sector companies should exercise caution in considering the use of debt finance (following the Pecking order theory) in their capital mix up to the optimal limits, as debt to equity ratio provided insignificant positive effect on performance; and that further studies be conducted on other sectors of the economy to provide more robust generalized inferences.
Keywords: Assets, Capital, Debt, Equity, Performance, Returns, Structure, employed