Abstract

Traditional Keynesian macroeconomic approaches states that extraordinary levels of government consumption expenditure increase employment levels of the population, productivity and investment levels through investment multiplier effects on aggregate demand. Thus, the spending of the government increases also raises aggregate demand to the right, causing output to increase depending on the magnitude and efficiency of expenditure multipliers on growth. The focus of this paper is to examining the impact of general government final consumption expenditure- economic growth nexus for the Gambia for the periods from 1977 to 2017. The econometrics techniques used is Ordinary Least Square (OLS) method to explore the impacts either negative or positive effects of government consumption final expenditure on growth in the Gambia for the periods under study Data for the study were obtained from World Bank(WDI). The findings were interpreted based on a 5 percent significance level of alpha. The multiple regression result revealed that government consumption was not a significant impact on the economic growth of the Gambia. This opposes the traditional Keynesian macroeconomic theory. This study suggested that Capital and recurrent expenditures on economic facilities should be directed mainly to productive economics. This will stimulate activities in the economic sectors like agriculture, industry and services, that will perhaps contrary the undesirable effect of government expenditure on economic growth especially in the Gambia in which the time series study was based.

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