RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MONETARY POLICY AND PUBLIC DEBT IN NIGERIA (1990-2023)

played a role, directly or indirectly, in its completion. Abstract This study examined the impact of monetary policy on public debt in Nigeria. Specifically, the study aimed to; analyze the trends of money supply and public debt from the period 1980-2022, examine the short-run relationship between monetary policy and public debt, investigate the long run influence of monetary policy on public debt and assess the determinants of public debt in Nigeria, to achieve the objectives, an ex-post facto research design was adopted to gather time series data for the study from the period 1980-2022. The Auto-regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Model was employed to investigate the objectives apart from the trend analysis used to achieve the objective one of the studies. In using the ARDL, it was necessary for the researcher to confirm the existence of long-run relationship between monetary policy and public debt through ARDL Bound test. The result of the ARDL Bound test revealed that there was a significant long-run relationship between monetary policy and public debt in Nigeria. More so, it was discovered that there was a significant negative short-run relationship between monetary policy and public debt in a Nigeria. The study finding further confirmed that monetary policy influenced public debt negatively in the long-run. The study concluded that a robust monetary policy might reduce the incidence of public debt in Nigeria. It was recommended that effective monetary policy must be put place by the monetary authority in Nigeria in order to reduce public debt.