Designing a Framework for Employment-Growth Targeting in Nigeria

Abstract

Unemployment in Nigeria has assumed disturbing proportions despite fifteen years of sustained economic growth outcomes between 2000 and 2014. This needs very urgent attention from policy makers since the problem has further resulted in other social vices like: armed robbery, kidnapping, political thuggery, pipe-line vandalisation, and social unrest.Unfortunately, policy makers have approached the deep-rooted problems with only tactical and superficial methods. There has been no serious attempt to target employment based on the economic fundamentals; and, the interdependencies and the interconnectedness of the various sectors and the working of the economy.Using Johansen co-integration, and applying Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) regression to time series sectoral economic data of Gross Value Added (GVA), employment, interest rate, wage rate, and inflation rate, collected from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) this study constructed a framework that policy makers can use to target growth and employment simultaneously.

Job Absorption Capacity of Nigeria’s Mining and Quarrying Sector

“…The series, which were in billions of Naira, were produced after the GDP rebasing exercise of 2014 which used 2010 as the base year. (Adeniyi, 2021).…”

“…In a time-series analysis, time is a variable as the other variables and the relationships among them changes or stabilises over time. The lagging approach employed in the analysis took care of the time trend in determining / explaining employment level in the economy (Adeniyi, 2021).…”

“…Minimum wage is, therefore, the lowest compensation that employers may legitimately pay to workers. This implies that it is the price floor below which a worker may not legally sell his labour services (Adeniyi, 2021).…”

“…Other wage concepts are: average wages in the public sector, average wages in the private sector, average wages in the junior staff category and average salaries and emoluments of senior staff categories both in the public and private sectors (NECA, 2003;and, Adeniyi, 2021). For this study, minimum wage change history was obtained from NBS and from this; the minimum wage series was generated.…”

“…Economists have postulated in literature that economic growth generates employment. It is against this background that it was expected that the growth regime of 1981 to 2014 should have helped to reduce unemployment, although, economists have acknowledged the advent of 'jobless growth" whereby unemployment co-exists with economic growth (Adeniyi, 2021).…”