Employment And Economic Growth In Nigeria

Amid the rising growth rate and increase in output, unemployment has been pervasive in the Nigerian economy. Extant literature and studies have identified the possibilities of having jobless growth in an economy. There is evidence of this in Sweden, Vietnam and Cote d’Ivoire. The purpose of the study is to ascertain the occurrence of this phenomenon in the Nigerian economy. Specifically, we set out to investigate those factors determining the level of employment and employment growth in Nigeria with a view towards estimating the employment elasticity of economic growth for the period 1981-2006. A simple model of employment and employment growth was formulated and estimated using the Ordinary Least Squares technique, before and after correcting for stationarity of the time series data using the Hodrick-Prescott filter. The data for the study was basically from secondary sources. Using the EViews Quantitative Software package for the descriptive and econometric analysis, we found that a positive and significant relationship existed between employment and economic growth as well as public expenditure. On the other hand a negative and significant relationship was observed between employment growth rate and growth rate of GDP in the economy. We advocate for increased labourpromoting foreign direct investment and an employment-focused public expenditure programme