Migrating

I have been blogging on this platform since 2009. Yes, it has really been that long. As in life everything has to change at some point and I am migrating to a new platform at nonso2.substack.com. If you were subscribed to this blog via email then you will be automatically migrating too. But if you…

How many people are there in Kano?

We haven’t had a census since 2006, and many argue that census was … not great. The last census before that was in 1991 and many argue that census was …. also not great. And before that we had a census in 1973 but that was so bad it was cancelled. And before then we…

Random thoughts on food imports

Nigeria, and Africa in general, has slowly become a net importer of food. Not that domestic production has not grown but consumption has grown faster than production. There are probably many factors behind this but one that I’ve been thinking about is the impact of urbanization and the competition between Nigerian historical food options, and…

CBN Bills…..

My column last Monday was on CBN bills. You can read it here. An interesting thing I didn’t mention was how the use of CBN bills has evolved over time. First thing you notice is the explosion sometime in 2016. NIFEX window anyone? Second thing is the continued growth to unprecedented levels. I know, there is…

Damning unemployment maps

My article in Business Day yesterday was about the recently released state-level unemployment data. The article was driven by the maps below and shows the change in the percent of people in each state who stopped being fully employed. Technically this is the change in unemployment plus the change in underemployment. You can think of…

More on the monetary policy rate

My column in Business Day yesterday basically questioned the usefulness of the Central Bank’s monetary policy committee(MPC) and its monetary policy rate(MPR), which has remained fixed at 14 percent for almost two years now. I argue that the MPR doesn’t mean much because the CBN doesn’t really implement it but acts differently. My thinking is…

What debt problem?

For a while last year I harped on and on about what looked like a country headed towards a debt crisis. Cue words like alarmist and so on being thrown around. It appears that the obvious is now becoming even more obvious. What is interesting to me though is how history tends to repeat itself.…

Monthly economic update and jarida.co

Just over a month ago I thought about starting a monthly economic update. You see, I write a lot mostly about topics in economics regarding the Nigerian economy and I thought about making my writing a bit more structured. So, I figured a paid monthly newsletter would be just the thing to force me to…

Why you probably should not let foreign exchange dealers make agriculture policy

The Central Bank “as part of its developmental objective of employment generation and inclusive growth” is as at it again. The 41 items ban from the foreign exchange market worked so well that they have gone on to include “fertilizer” on the list of items effectively banned from the foreign exchange markets. What this means…

On political competition and economic growth

I have a new paper in the South African Journal of Economics with a somewhat interesting finding. This paper examines the impact of political competition on economic growth. In this paper, I show that internal political dynamics, distinct from the type of political system, can having different effects on growth. Using results from the 1994…