Unemployment in Nigeria; A Challenge of Demographic Change?

ADEKOLA ¹ , ALLEN ² , OLAWOLE-ISAAC ³ , AKANBI ⁴ , ADEWUMI ⁵

Section:Research Paper, Product Type: Isroset-Journal
Vol.2 , Issue.5 , pp.1-9, May-2016

Online published on May 23, 2016

Copyright © ADEKOLA, ALLEN, OLAWOLE-ISAAC,AKANBI, ADEWUMI . This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 

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Abstract :
With the current population of approximately 182million people (PRB, 2015); Nigeria is the most populous Black Country in the world. Arguments are ripe whether her ever-growing population is the sole factor responsible also for her continuous growth of unemployment. To answer this question, this paper extracted secondary data from Population Reference Bureau (PRB, 2003-2015), United Nations Annex Table (2012), International Monetary Fund (IMF, 2002-2015) and National Bureau of Statistics (NBS, 2003-2015) to prove whether unemployment is mainly caused by demographic change in Nigeria or there are other intrinsic factors responsible for this social challenge. A comparative analysis of the population and unemployment structure of three purposively selected and heavily populated countries in three different continents-Nigeria, China and USA were undertaken. Results show that population growth is not the SOLE factor responsible for increase in unemployment in Nigeria as unemployment statistics is stable for U.S. and China while their populations are growing, but the reverse is the case for Nigeria as both population and unemployment are growing. Recommendations were thereafter made to address other likely factors identified.

Key-Words / Index Term :
Unemployment, Population Growth, Comparative, Factors, Population, Nigeria

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