Analysis of Budget Policy on Agriculture under Different Governance Regimes

Towards resolving the role of governance in economic development, a model of factualcounterfactual analysis was formulated to determine the relative preference of two different regimes for agriculture in the public expenditure budget of developing countries. The poster is in eight main slides: Introduction (1); Model presentation (2, 3); Application to Nigeria (4,5); Empirical Results (6, 7); Conclusion (8). The results indicate that (a) the military showed greater preference for capital allocations to agriculture in the budget while the civil regime showed greater preference for recurrent allocation, which reflects the presence of strong opposition during the civilian regime that tends to over blow the size of civil service workforce engaged in agricultural policy administration together with the attendant recurrent commitments such as personal emoluments and general overhead; and (b) on the whole the civil regime reveals greater preference in terms of the total budget than the military regime, which suggests that the incremental recurrent expenditure during the civilian regime more than offsets the incremental capital expenditure during the military regime. Thus the scope for budget restructuring in favour agricultural growth through higher capital allocations in the public expenditure budget exists in the present dem ocratic dispensation to a larger extent than during the previous dictatorship under the military regime.