Poverty reduction efforts in Nigeria 1996 – 2004: a micro level analysis of the relative importance of income growth and redistribution

A common narrative on Africa’s development process is that specific country policies of income growth and redistribution are necessary for poverty reduction. For growth theoreticians, economic growth must be pursued while for political economists, redistribution is necessary to cushion the detrimental effect of reform policies. These views appear to converge in the many policies and programmes implemented over the years by the Nigerian government. In light of this, we accounted for the effect of these variables using two recent national household survey data sets collected by the National Bureau of statistics in 1996 and 2004 upon which we applied three commonly used poverty indices(FGT) and the Shapely decomposition analytical framework. For robustness, we carried out complementary analysis using the stochastic dominance test and growth incidence curve. Results showed that for the whole country, rural and urban areas respectively, income growth component accounted for -16%, -10% and -10%, while the redistribution component represented -5%, -7% and -4%, suggesting on the average a poverty reducing role. However, a more disaggregated pattern of changes in per capita income reveal that the poor did not benefit much.