This paper analyses the effect of health expenditure on economic development in Nigeria using yearly data from 1980 to 2019 on capital health, recurrent health expenditure, and population growth, sourced from the World Development Indicators, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Statistical Bulletin, and the United Nation Development Report. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), cointegration, and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) were used to estimate the model. The coefficient of capital health expenditure in the long run has a positive and significant sign, while recurrent health expenditure is negative for development, though insignificant in effect. Development responds positively to population growth variation in the short run too. The paper recommends that the Nigerian Government allocate more funds for capital healthcare expenditure to increase the pace of economic development.

Keywords: Human development, public healthcare expenditure and population growth.