Population Dynamics, Labour Force Participation and Economic Misery in Nigeria: An Empirical Investigation
Abstract
Nigeria in recent years has been confronted with several development challenges, in addition to unstable macroeconomic environment. About 133 million of her population lives in multidimensional poverty, with high rates of unemployment (33.3%) and inflation (27.33%), coupled with increased public debt profile. All these have culminated into a deteriorating misery index (MI), which has risen from about to 61.15 in 2022 to around 73.05 in 2023, using the Steve Hanks misery index methodology. This study examined the effects of population dynamics and labour force participation on economic misery in Nigeria over the period, 1990-2022. It employed the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds testing and Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) techniques for analysis. Having checked the time series properties of the variables employed in the study and establishing the existence of long-run cointegration among the variables, the ARDL and DOLS findings showed that population dynamics significantly aggravated economic misery while labour force participation rate, economic growth and capital formation reduced misery level significantly in Nigeria. Therefore, governments at all levels should invest in physical capital, encourage more labour force participation, and continue to grow the economy. Moreover, the high rate of fertility should be put in check through encouragement of the girl-child education policy while inflation and unemployment rates, which are the ‘bads’ that raise the MI should be checked using appropriate fiscal and monetary policies.
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