Jobless Growth in Nigeria: Determining Employment Intensive Sectors

Abstract

Growth rates in many African countries for over a decade, between 2002 and 2014 were relatively good and greatly applauded; however, high unemployment remains a persistent challenge of macroeconomic management. This situation now popularly called jobless growth, remains an important issue for policy makers, because it is linked with poverty and social unrests. The study therefore examines employment and sectoral output growth in Nigeria with a view to identifying sectors with high employment intensity. The Structural Vector Auto-Regressive (SVAR) framework was employed in the estimation strategy. Background analysis and stylized facts confirm the existence of jobless growth in Nigeria. Findings from the model estimation demonstrate that the agriculture sector has great potential for job creation. This underscores the need to focus on developing the sector and focussing on agriculture led economy that is able to diversify into other sectors that are by nature labour intensive, thus, making growth more inclusive.