ELECTRICITY ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND QUALITY OF LIFE: EVIDENCE FROM AN ELECTRICITY ENERGY-DEFICIENT ECONOMY

The electricity-growth literature is replete with empirical evidences of studies that adopted the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or its surrogates  as  measures of the quality of life. Hence, the fundamental focus of this study is to explore the link between electricity energy consumption  and quality of life in Nigeria for the period 1990 to 2020.The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was adapted as the econometric estimation technique for the examination of the link between electricity energy consumption (ELE) and the quality of life of electricity-dependent economic agents represented as  HDI1 and HDI2. The resultant estimates and outcomes of the ARDL test  indicated that there is no short and long-run connectivity between ELE and HDI (1). We concluded that, ELE has not been  beneficial for the enhancement of  the quality of life (when represented as HDI1) and / or its accumulation in the short- and long -run but has long run positive consequences for  only  HDI2. Therefore, the government of Nigeria, and the international bilateral and multilateral agencies for the development of quality of life should encourage electricity consumption as a complement of human well-being and  quality of life especially HDI1 and HDI2 for short and long-run purposes. Keywords: Electricity Energy, Quality of life, Human Development, Cointegration, ARDL Bounds Test, Nigeria