Nigeria wants to end poverty by 2030. How can it achieve this?
来源:World Economic Forum;发表于:2022-04-12;人气指数:443
Nigeria
wants to end poverty by 2030. How can it achieve this?
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/poverty-reduction-nigeria/
Nigeria aims to lift
all its people out of poverty by 2030.
Image: Arne
Hoel/World Bank
29 Mar 2022
Jonathan Lain
Economist, World
Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice
Marta Schoch
Consultant, The World
Bank
Tara Vishwanath
Lead Economist and a
Global Lead of the Global Solutions Group for Welfare Implications of Climate,
Fragility, and Conflict Risks, The Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the
World Bank
*Before COVID-19,
around 80 million people in Nigeria – 40% of the population – lived below the
poverty line.
*Nigeria now aspires
to lift all its people out of poverty by 2030.
*In the short run,
the country needs to tackle COVID-related inequalities, such as vaccine
distribution and learning losses because of school closures.
*Longer term,
macroeconomic reforms and access to infrastructure covering everything from
drinking water to telecoms networks needs to be improved.
Nigeria aspires to
lift all of its people out of poverty by 2030. This is an ambitious
target, as even before COVID-19 struck, some 4 in 10 Nigerians lived
below the poverty line—about 80 million people. Some of the key drivers of
poverty in Nigeria and potential poverty-reducing policies are considered in
detail in a new report, A Better Future for All Nigerians: Nigeria Poverty
Assessment 2022.
Looking at a snapshot
of poverty at a single point in time can only take us so far in developing the
policies that Nigeria needs to meet its target. What we really need to know is
how poverty has changed in Nigeria over time.
Assessing poverty
trends has long proved difficult in Nigeria. The 2018/19 Nigerian Living
Standards Survey (NLSS) provided the first official estimates of poverty
in more than a decade. Yet, given a range of improvements made to the
questionnaire—especially on how food consumption was measured—it is difficult
to compare this directly with the poverty estimate from the previous official
household survey in Nigeria, the 2009/10 Harmonised Nigerian Living
Standards Survey (HNLSS).1,2
Nevertheless, two
specialized statistical techniques, summarized in a new paper, can help us
construct poverty trends for Nigeria. First, we can “back-cast” Nigeria’s
poverty rate, using the 2018/19 NLSS as a springboard in combination with
sectoral GDP estimates. Second, we can impute consumption—and, in turn,
poverty—into a decade-long survey containing many key non-monetary indicators,
the General Household Survey-Panel.
Whichever approach we
use, it seems that poverty reduction in Nigeria was at first slow and then
stagnated in the decade before COVID-19 (see Figure 1).3 While
there was some progress in the first half of the 2010s, this was reversed after
the 2016 recession (induced by falling oil prices) hit and population growth
started outstripping real GDP growth. This stalling progress on poverty broadly
matches the path of non-monetary indicators, including education and access to
basic infrastructure, from Nigeria’s Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). Subsequent
projections suggest that COVID-19 has worsened poverty in Nigeria even further.
1. The 2016 Nigeria
Poverty Assessment also identified several anomalies in the 2009/10 HNLSS
consumption data.
2. Naively comparing these two surveys would suggest that poverty dropped by
more than 17 percentage points in the decade to COVID-19.
3. The fact that back-casting and survey-to-survey imputations—two totally
different techniques with totally different underlying assumptions—yield such
similar results, adds robustness to these findings.
Figure 2. Stalling
poverty reduction in Nigeria in the decade prior to COVID-19
Poverty rate
calculated using the international poverty line of US$1.90 2011 PPP per person
per day.
Image: 2018/19 NLSS,
GHS, and World Bank estimates.
Note: Estimates
exclude Borno. Poverty rate calculated using the international poverty line of
US$1.90 2011 PPP per person per day. Population estimates taken from the United
Nations, via the World Development Indicators. Further details on back-casting and
survey-to-survey imputations provided in Lain, Schoch, and Vishwanath (2022).
Imputed estimates to be included in the World Bank’s official global poverty
measurement. Source: 2018/19 NLSS, GHS, and World Bank estimates.
Moreover, when per
capita incomes were growing in the early part of the 2010s, it appears that
richer Nigerians benefited more than poorer Nigerians (see Figure 2). Richer
Nigerians also lost out more when the 2016 recession struck. Thus, the fortunes
of the rich waxed and waned in line with Nigeria’s growth, much more so than
the poor. This matches labor market indicators from the same period.
When the 2016 recession hit, the shift towards farming as a key coping strategy
to try to maintain incomes was more pronounced among Nigerian workers in the
top 60% of the consumption distribution than those in the bottom 40%.
Figure 3. Consumption
for richer Nigerians is more closely linked to Nigeria’s growth prospects
Further details on
survey-to-survey imputations provided in Lain, Schoch, and Vishwanath (2022).
Image: 2018/19 NLSS,
GHS, and World Bank estimates.
Note: Estimates
exclude Borno. Further details on survey-to-survey imputations provided in
Lain, Schoch, and Vishwanath (2022). Source: 2018/19 NLSS, GHS, and World Bank
estimates.
These findings chime
with global evidence that poverty is becoming clustered in certain
regions—such as Nigeria’s poor, largely rural north—in large countries.
What is more, poverty in Nigeria is also entrenched in the areas most affected
by climate and conflict shocks. Therefore, there is a
critical need for policies that can help poorer people in poorer areas.
Given these patterns,
what can be done to make growth work for Nigeria’s poor?
In the short-run,
three immediate policies can help poor Nigerians recover from the COVID-19
crisis and, since COVID-19 has exacerbated inequality across many dimensions,
such policies directly support redistribution. First, distributing
vaccines quickly and equitably remains vital for curbing the direct health
threat of the virus, especially given uncertainty around new variants.
Second, learning losses from school closures still need to be
reversed to reduce long-term consequences for human capital; this may involve
encouraging children to go back to school when it is safe and adopting low-tech
remote learning solutions that work for the poor when needed. Third, social
protection should be expanded to offset income losses and prevent
households falling into, or further into, poverty; with shocks and uncertainty
proliferating, exemplified by the global economic impact of the conflict in
Ukraine, this could help build household resilience now and in the future.
Yet Nigeria also
needs at least three types of deeper, longer-term reforms to foster and sustain
pro-poor growth and help raise people out of poverty. With Nigeria’s young
population continuing to grow, the urgency of these reforms cannot be
overstated. Now is the time to ensure that the country seizes its potential
demographic dividend.
First, macroeconomic
reforms, including to fiscal, trade, and exchange rate policy, could help
diversify the economy, invigorate structural transformation, and create good,
productive jobs, especially wage jobs that offer the best pathways out of
poverty. Despite crude oil’s vast contributions to exports and government
revenues, less than 1% of Nigerians are employed in mining and extractives,
underlining the need to allow other, more labor-intensive sectors to flourish.
Government spending could also be increased for pro-poor causes, such as
health, education, and infrastructure—the main concerns among Nigerians
themselves—by improving revenue collection and redirecting spending from expensive
subsidies that benefit the rich more than the poor.
Second, structural
transformation and the creation of productive wage jobs on a large scale
may not happen overnight, so policies to boost the productivity of farm
and non-farm household enterprises will be crucial in the meantime. For farms,
this includes developing new and more resilient crop varieties, as well as
investments in storage, transport, and market access. For non-farm household
enterprises, policies that ease credit constraints could be
especially important.
Third, for Nigerians
to seize the opportunities available to them, the bedrock of infrastructure
needs to be strengthened. The correlation between monetary poverty and
access to electricity, adequate drinking water, and improved sanitation is
extremely high in Nigeria. Yet information and communication technologies,
including mobile phones, could also be used to help boost access to jobs
and markets and to support the rollout of social protection programs and other
redistributive government policies.
The specifics of
poverty-reducing policies will depend on redoubling efforts to gather and
analyze data regularly. New official household survey data, the collection of
which should start later in 2022, will provide far more detailed insights into
changes in poverty over time —as well as into key drivers, constraints, and
corrective policies—than even the back-casts and imputations discussed
above. By investing in data, Nigeria can build trust, accountability, and
transparency, taking substantial strides forward along its pathway to poverty
reduction.