Impact of Education on Household Welfare in Nigeria

Human capital development, especially higher educational attainment, attaches high premium to its expected economic benefits, in form of better welfare. This study investigates the effect of educational attainment of household head on two indicators of household welfare, namely labour market earnings and household per capita total expenditure on food and non-food items in Nigeria. The study uses the Double Hurdle (DH) model and Quantile Regression (QR) to address these objectives. The empirical results show that returns to schooling are substantially higher at the tertiary level of education compared with primary, secondary, and postgraduate levels of education in Nigeria. Furthermore, additional years of tertiary education attainment by household heads was found to increase household per capita total expenditure more than additional years of primary, secondary and postgraduate education. The implication of these findings is that the improvements in economic welfare of households in Nigerian is driven more by the attainment of tertiary education by household heads, relative to other levels of education.