The Impact of Human Capital Development in Employment Generation in Nigeria

A major development issue in Nigeria is unemployment, despite a plethora of economic policies to guide labour absorption and utilisation in the country. Some major reasons for this unemployment challenges have been hinged on the level of human capital development as well as other socio-economic issues. Using the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, a quantitative analysis of the effect human capital in stimulating employment or otherwise was assessed in Nigeria for the period 1970-2014. It was discovered that the level of human capital was not sufficient to stimulate employment or reduce unemployment in Nigeria. Besides, it was discovered that population growth is really not the challenge for employment in Nigeria especially if human capital can be harnessed productively, and channelled towards viable and rewarding sectors of the economy