Nigeria’s unemployment distribution pattern: A case of resource curse?

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Nigeria’s Unemployment Rate Jumps from 27.1% in Q2 2020 to 33.3% in Q4 2020 – NBS

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) this week released the state-by-state labour force statistics for the period ended Q3’ 2018, which is a breakdown of the national edition previously released in December 2018. Although the December 2018 edition had earlier revealed that the unemployment rate in Nigeria currently stood at an all-time high of 23.1%, its distribution across states and geopolitical zones in the country were not precisely stated. Hence, our interest in the state-by-state edition.

The new data revealed that while NO states have a single digit unemployment rate, the magnitude of the variation in unemployment rate among the states was largely impacted by the labour intensive nature of the predominant economic activity of the states and not resource availability. For instance, we noticed that Osun, Oyo and Ondo states (all in South-West) with agriculture and related activities as predominant occupation had the least unemployment rates of 10.07%, 10.34% and 14.24% respectively (due to the labour intensive nature of the occupation), while the oil & gas producing states of Akwa-Ibom, Rivers and Bayelsa states (all
in South-South) had the highest unemployment rates of 37.72%, 36.38% and 32.56% respectively.

Looking across the geopolitical zones, the average unemployment rate was lowest in the SouthWest – 13.94%, followed by North-Central – 22.96%, South-East – 23.17%, North-East – 24.91% and North-Central – 22.96%, while the South-South has the highest average unemployment rate of 32.22%.

 

GTI RESEARCH