Human Capital Development, Energy Consumption and Crude Oil Exports in Nigeria: Implications for Sustainable Development

This study's main objective is to examine the roles of human capital development, energy consumption and crude oil exports in driving sustainable development goal 8-sustainable economic growth in Nigeria. Annual data from 1990 to 2018 were sourced from World Data Atlas, International Energy Agency, WDI and the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin respectively to achieve the aims of the study. Autoregressive Distributed Lag technique of estimation was adopted for the data analysis. Consequently, the principal findings of this study could be presented as follows; there exists an insignificant positive relationship between electricity power consumption and real GDP growth rate. This implies that energy consumption in Nigeria has an inadequate capacity to drive a sustainable economic growth. Similarly, oil exports and the growth rate of the real GDP have a significant positive relationship with each other. This means that sustainability of economic growth is highly dependent on oil exports in Nigeria. Conversely, government expenditure on educational sector and the growth rate of real GDP have a significant negative relationship with each other. Likewise, expenditure of government on health sector has an insignificant negative relationship with the growth rate of the real GDP. This implies that human capital development in Nigeria lacks the capacity to guarantee a sustainable economic growth. As a result of the outcome of this research, the following were recommended for Nigerian policymakers and by extension developing countries, any time the goal of these policymakers are sustainable economic growth, the development of human capital through adequate funding of educational and health sectors should be embarked upon. In the same vein, the policymakers should provide uninterrupted electricity supply for enhancement of maximum outputs in the country