Impact Of Pension Funds Investment on the Economic Growth of Nigeria

The fundamental objective of the study is to examine the impact of Pension Funds Administrators' investment on the economic growth of Nigeria. The independent variable was proxied by investments in the Local capital market, Local money market and real estate, whereas the dependent variable, economic growth, was represented by GDP. The time series data used for the research were collected from the annual reports published by the Nigerian Pension Commission (PENCOM) and the economic data published by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the World Development Indicators (WDI) databank. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to examine the impact of the independent variables on the GDP. The outcome of the Bounds Cointegration Test revealed that there was no cointegration, indicating the absence of long-run relationships between PFAs' Investments and economic growth; therefore, only the short-run ARDL was estimated. To determine the optimal lag length, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) was found to be the indicated criterion for the VAR model. Using the VAR Lag Order Selection Criteria, lag 1 was found to be the optimal lag for the ARDL model. The result of the short-run ARD estimation showed that investments in the Local Capital Market, Local Money Market, and Real Estate all have a positive but not statistically significant impact on the economic growth (GDP) of Nigeria. Therefore, the study concluded that Pension Fund Administrators' investments have no significant impact on Nigeria's economic growth represented by GDP. It was recommended that PFAs should invest more in the capital market, local money market and real estate to stimulate GDP growth.