This study examines the relationship among poverty, inequality and economic growth in Nigeria by employing macroeconomic variables which include GDP growth rate, per capita income, literacy rate, government expenditure on education, and government expenditure on health. Time series data over the period from 1980 to 2012 were fitted into the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression equations using various econometric techniques such as Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) unit root test, Phillips-Perron unit root test, Johansen co-integration test, and Error Correction Mechanism (ECM) technique. The OLS results reveal that GDP growth rate increases inequality, but reduces poverty in the country. It is thus suggested that, aside boosting the GDP, an increased effective government spending on education and public health facilities, as well as programmes that are meant primarily for the non-privileged like children, women and the poor in general, be provided for poverty and inequality to reduce in the country.

In this paper we reexamined the study done in King and Ramlogan-Dobson (2011) as well as Chong et al. (2008) by investigating the nonlinear convergence among the G16 countries using alternative methodology. We find that the results are sensitive to the method of analysis even after allowing for structural breaks. With semi-parametric model only six (6) cases of convergence were identified and eight (8)

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The question about whether consolidation policy can raise bank's productivity is an interesting subject of discourse in monetary theory, though not too common. This present paper applied the Malmquist Data Envelopment Analysis to examine the total factor productivity changes (TFPC) of fifteen major deposit money banks in Nigeria over the 2004/2005 bank consolidation period, three years before and after. The results showed a similar productivity change in the pre-and bank consolidation era but revealed a slight reduction in the productivity thereafter. What constituted the major source of productivity growth in the banking industry was technological progress. However, there was no significant difference in the productivity change of the domestic and foreign banks, whose majority shares were held by expatriates.