Sustainable Development and Youth Unemployment in Nigeria

Abstract

Sustainable development and youth unemployment in Nigeria empirically study the effect of youth unemployment on Nigeria’s sustainable development using GDP Growth as a proxy for sustainable development. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach was applied on secondary data of over thirty-two-year period (1993-2024) sourced from World Bank repository. The empirical results revealed that youth unemployment negatively affects economic growth, specifically, a 1% increase in youth unemployment in the long run reduces gross domestic product growth by 1.59% and 4.34% in the short-run indicating that youth unemployment significantly exacerbates economic growth thereby impeding sustainable development. The study also found a significant positive short-run relationship between inflation and GDP growth, and a negative relationship between population growth, poverty and GDP growth indicating that their influence is primarily transitory rather than structural due to the absence of significant long-run effects. To foster sustainable development, the study recommends that government should prioritising youth employment initiatives by providing quality education as well as quality vocational and technical training that aligns with the job market demand, entrepreneurship programs and entrepreneurial credit; Create an enabling environment for private sectors to strive and encourage job creation in labour-intensive sectors to easily absorb the growing unemployed youth Population; Adopt fiscal and monetary policies essential for reducing and controlling economic volatility thereby fostering sustainable development; Invest in education, healthcare, and family planning to ensure that population expansion translates into a demographic dividend and address poverty through direct social interventions to cushion vulnerable populations and stabilise aggregate demand.