Pension Assets Investments in the Nigerian Economy

This study looked into pension assets investments and its impact in the Nigerian economy. The investments includes quarterly reports of corporate debt securities, government bond securities, mutual funds’ investments, money market instruments, private equity funds and real estate securities from 2004 – 2020, and was sourced from the statistics database of the National Pension Commission, the Central Bank of Nigeria and the World data bank. The statistical measures used to analyze the data are the descriptive test, Unit root test, Co-integration test, Vector error correction, Causality and Impulse response function. The outcome of the analysis show that the variables were stationary after first differences were taken; and were also co-integrated at 2 lags indicating that both short and long run equilibrium relationship exist among the variables. From the vector error correction model, previous years’ deviations from long run equilibrium had a 0.09% speed of adjustment; leading to a short run equilibrium. The Causality test reveal that changes in government bond securities lead to changes in real estate securities and changes in money market investments leads to changes in government bond securities. In addition, the impulse response demonstrates that a shock to the system produces more negative responses than positive ones. The study thus recommends that the pension industry should vigorously create more awareness on the importance of employee pension plan; develop more e-channels to help rake in investible funds as well as develop more innovative products to support diversification of pension fund in different assets classes among others.