Disaggregated military expenditure and the debt level in Nigeria

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of military spending on both external debt and internal debt in Nigeria for the period of 1981-2012. Unlike the existing literature, the total military expenditure series is further disaggregated into recurrent and capital military expenditures. We employ a newly-introduced combined cointegration approach to test for long run relationship in the variables. After establishing cointegration relationship, the ARDL, FMOLS and DOLS methods are used in computing the long run estimates. Overall, our results reveal that a rise in military spending promotes external and internal debt, with recurrent expenditure having more impact on the level of indebtedness.