Government Access to Finance and Economic Growth: A Case of Selected States in Southeast

The study empirically explored the effect of Government access to finance on economic growth in Nigeria. Specifically, the study focused on determining the influence of access to finance from statutory allocation, internal sources and Value-added Tax (VAT) on GDP in Southeast, Nigeria. The period covered the five South-East states in Nigeria: Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo state for the period of 19 years (2000-2018). Research design adopted was ex-post facto design while the panel data used in the study was extracted from the annual financial statement of each of the selected states in Southeast, Nigeria through the office of the Accountant-Generals of the respective states. This formed the independent variables while the data for the dependent variable was collected from the office of National Bureau of Statistics for the same period (2000-2018). The panel secondary data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson's correlation, and panel multiple regression at 5% level of significance. Outcome of the study revealed that access to finance from statutory allocation, internal sources, and value-added tax have significant and positive influence on economic growth of southeast, Nigeria at 5% level of significance. The study concludes that all the independent variables jointly explain approximately 69% of the total variations in GDP while other variables not captured in the model account for the rest. Also, the p-value of the F-statistics < 0.001 shows that the model is a good one. The study therefore, recommended that Government of Southeast States should take special note of revenue generated from statutory allocation, internal sources, value-added tax, and loans as these have significant influences on economic growth.