Designing a Framework for Employment-Growth Targeting in Nigeria

Adetunji Adeniyi

doi:10.5296/jad.v7i1.18295

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.

Highlights

Unemployment has become a major and seemingly intractable socio-economic problem in Nigeria
The findings revealed that, economic growth had positive relationship with employment, the relationship was not significant
A beauty of the Vector Error Correction Model analysis is that it enables a simultaneous modeling and analysis of all the sectors of the economy at the same time

Summary

Introduction

Unemployment has become a major and seemingly intractable socio-economic problem in Nigeria. There seem to be no long-term strategic data-based approach to solving the problem. Policy makers often adopt tactical approaches in addressing the deep-rooted economic problem. Most often, they expect employment to be an automatic by-product consequence of some superficial policies, with no concerted attempt to target employment as done to other socio-economic variables like growth, inflation, inflation, and interest rate. They expect employment to be an automatic by-product consequence of some superficial policies, with no concerted attempt to target employment as done to other socio-economic variables like growth, inflation, inflation, and interest rate This aberration has become evident in the incidences of growth without commensurate job creation. This study aimed at designing a framework for targeting growth and employment simultaneously

Objectives

Results

Conclusion