Acta Universitatis Danubius. Œconomica, Vol 16, No 2 (2020)

Abstract

This paper investigated the impact of political elites’ corruption and political stability on economic growth in Nigeria using ARDL bound test approach. The study adopts annual time series data for the period of 1996-2017. The stationarity properties of the variables were tested using Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) and Phillips-Perron (PP) tests. Result from the bound test reveals that corruption exact a negative and significant impact on economic growth both in the short and long run, while political stability exact a positive and significant impact on economic growth in the short run but an insignificant impact in the long run. This finding revealed that political stability which includes stability in government, absence of internal, external and ethnic conflict/tension promote economic growth in Nigeria in the short run while corruption was found to contribute to the Nigerian economy by reducing cumbersome bureaucratic control. In the light of the findings, the paper recommend that political elites’ should be cautioned for desperation of power and common/public interest of the society should supersede individual interest.