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This study examines the relationship between government expenditure on health and economic growth in Botswana. It seeks to test the existence of cointegration and specification of the deterministic components with special reference to the Pantula Principle. This helps to overcome the shortfall of the method by Johansen, which may lead to spurious results by omitting the presence of deterministic components in the analysis. The cointegration approach is used and tested using three methods by Engle and Granger (1987) or EG, a procedure suggested by Johansen (1988) and error correction model (ECM) approach proposed by Granger(1988) and short-run analysis is made using the pairwise granger causality tests. Findings show that the correct model specification for testing long-run relationships consists of one cointegrating vector with a constant which is the most restrictive hypothesis according to the Pantula principle. Using the Johansen approach, total health expenditure and recurring health expenditure have a cointegration relationship with growth while development health expenditure and growth are not cointegrated. The ECM and the approach by EG confirm a weak and/or no cointegration between the variables. Growth has no effect on government expenditure on health in the short run, but a cointegration relationship suggests that it may marginally contribute to an increase in health expenditure over the long term. The study clarifies the correct model to test for cointegration and specification for the deterministic component. It confirms the existence of a healthcare expenditure-led growth hypothesis. This requires Botswana to design a policy that targets specific parts of recurrent and development health expenditure to support human capital development and influence future growth.

Does agricultural activity affect human mortality? This research paper provides an empirical analysis on this important question by separately regressing agricultural outputs and its components on human mortality rate in Nigeria over the period 1981–2019. Employing the autoregressive distributed lag estimator, a long run relationship exist between agricultural outputs and human mortality rate in Nigeria. Regarding the parameter estimates, findings showed that the indirect relationship between agriculture outputs and mortality is statistically insignificant in the long run. More so, in the short run, the current level of agriculture outputs reported a significant positive coefficient whereas the first lag has a significant negative parameter. Concerning the agriculture components, in the long run, fishing activity negatively and significantly influenced human mortality whereas forestry activity directly impacted on human mortality rates. The influence of both crop and livestock productions on mortality rate is not statistically established in the long run. The study therefore suggests the need for government to adopt pro-poor policies that is capable of improving investments in agricultural activities by both public and private sectors so as to curtail human mortality rate in the country.