DETERMINANTS AND MEASUREMENTS OF POVERTY IN NIGERIAN ECONOMY.
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DETERMINANTS AND MEASUREMENTS OF POVERTY IN NIGERIAN ECONOMY.
Chapter one
1.1INTRODUCTION
Poverty is one of humanity’s most stubborn challenges today. In 1995, an estimated 1.3 billion of the world’s 5.8 billion people were living in the shackles of severe poverty, surviving on less than one dollar a day (Human Development Report, 1998).
Poverty is a global epidemic that denies people the right to realise their full potential. Although there is no commonly agreed definition of poverty, it can be described as a lack of income to meet one’s basic human requirements.
If a country’s actual national income is low, it will be poor, and raising its people’s standard of life will require an increase in total output volume. Poverty has frequently been characterised as a state of low income or consumption.
Essentially, it is easy to identify the poor. The poor are individuals who cannot get a sufficient income, find a secure employment, own property, or maintain a healthy living environment. They also lack proper education and are unable to meet their fundamental health needs, as well as their basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter.
Poverty among abundance is a striking characteristic of the Nigerian landscape. Nigeria is the continent’s wealthiest country, but millions of its citizens live in poverty.
According to the Human Development Report (1998), Nigeria is one of the world’s 25 poorest countries, with more than one-third of the population not anticipated to live past the age of forty.
This is not the Nigerian Dream. It’s the Nigerian paradox. Poverty is a more serious issue in our society than in societies with far lower incomes and wealth.
Poverty in the middle of poverty is simpler to understand and even condone, but in a land of abundance, it is difficult to understand why some people are not sufficiently fed, clothed, or housed. Poverty is a reality that must be researched, comprehended, acknowledged, and ultimately destroyed.
However, attempts to reduce poverty in Nigeria have proven futile. A true welfare package focused at sustaining and improving the poor’s living conditions has yet to be fully implemented in Nigeria.
The most recent poverty project is the Poverty Alleviation project (PAP), which was implemented by the Obasanjo government in 1999 and has only contributed to the country’s increased poverty.
The poverty line is frequently used to determine the proportion of poverty, which is typically based on the level of income or consumer expenditure by households, despite the fact that poverty is felt and noticed mostly by the poor themselves.
Poverty can be classified in two ways: absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty occurs when physical human subsistence, such as feeding, clothing, and housing, is not guaranteed, but relative poverty occurs when a person or household’s provision of goods is less than that of other people or families.
Absolute and relative poverty can be viewed from two perspectives: microeconomics and macroeconomics. In microeconomics, poverty is defined as a state in which individuals or households are unable to meet their basic necessities.
Poverty exists when the average population of a country lives below the subsistence level. Thus, although the macroeconomic idea refers to the country, the microeconomic approach focuses on households or individuals.
Governments’ concern for the plight of the poor in emerging nations has grown in recent years, but these countries’ economies have been hampered by a relatively unfriendly external and internal economic and environmental climate.
Some of the entanglements faced include repeating external debt-servicing loads, trade imbalances, high and widespread unemployment, high rates of inflation, capital flight, low capacity utilisation, and rapid population expansion.
As a result, strong comments poured in from all over the country concerning the government’s inability to establish and implement policies for addressing society’s basic human needs in order to ensure a just and equitable society.
Apparently, the misery of the poor and the necessity to rearticulate development initiatives have dominated debates of current schemes. Despite the attention and seriousness given to the issue, Nigeria has yet to develop a rehabilitative welfare package aimed at relieving poverty.
Many Nigerians in rural areas continue to lack access to basic social services. This is unrelated to the nature of the techniques, which are broad in scope and not directed at any one population.
Various development strategies aimed to cushion people’s social welfare have not been implemented in the later. Even better, the government’s spending mechanisms lend credibility and prove her unwavering dedication to the welfare of the people. Nonetheless, mass poverty remains the most frequent socioeconomic challenge in Nigerian society.
Finally, poverty indicators in Nigeria will remain frightening. Poverty alleviation in Nigeria necessitates, among other things, granting the poor access to productive assets, increasing their returns on those assets, increasing their access to education and health services, improving their employment opportunities, and supplementing their resources with income or resource transfers.
1.2 Statement of Research Problem
Poverty in Nigeria has continued to worsen and spread. Despite the institutionalisation of several poverty alleviation programmes, many have underperformed due to the government’s lack of sincerity, bureaucracy, and inability to distinguish between economic and social development planning.
To begin, the degree of inequality in Nigeria’s economy, as well as its effects on overall economic performance, must be underlined. This demonstrates the full scope of poverty and how easily the rich become richer while the poor become poorer, expanding the inequality gap.
Second, the success of government policies aimed at alleviating poverty must be evaluated. This reflects the government’s concern for eradicating poverty and the extent to which policies are implemented to ensure a measurable size of poverty eradication in the overall economy through the employment of an efficient workforce and encouraging them through a good wage system.
Third, the issue of determining the magnitude of poverty in the Nigerian economy and how it is influenced by total savings, private consumption expenditures, and the inflation rate.
This problem reveals the dismal state of the Nigerian economy in terms of poverty and its overall consequences on Nigerians’ local consumption, savings as a result of lower income in the form of wages, and investing power as the little earned goes to consumption.
As a result, the important topic that the study attempts to solve is the degree of inequality in the Nigerian economy, inefficient government policies for poverty alleviation, and determining the extent of poverty in the Nigerian economy.
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