Working Papers

The World Health Organization (WHO) emphasises that tobacco use is a significant hurdle to public health and development gains worldwide, as it imposes significant economic costs on countries both in terms of direct medical care for adults and lost productivity. Cigarette smoking and other forms of tobacco use impose a large and growing public health burden globally and in Nigeria. Globally, tobacco use is the most preventable cause of death. Statistics show that tobacco use caused 100 million deaths in the twentieth century, and if current trends continue unchecked, one billion people (about 10 million, one in six adults, per year) will die from tobacco-related causes in the twenty-first century (Blecher and Ross 2013). Nearly 80 per cent of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, especially in Asia (ibid.). Presently in Nigeria, more than 17,500 deaths are recorded each year on account of tobacco-related diseases; that is about 207 men and 130 women per week (Tobacco Atlas 2015). In the past, tobacco use and tobacco control in Africa received little attention relative to other regions and health issues. This was due to the perceived low smoking prevalence in Africa in addition to the more immediate need for interventions against infectious diseases. However, the trends are quickly changing. With improving economic growth and health in Africa, the number of smokers and cigarettes smoked in the region is rising. In Nigeria, smoking prevalence is growing at an average of 4 per cent each year; from 11.3 per cent in 2000 to 17.4 per cent in 2015 (World Bank 2017). According to data from Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) and the GlobalData Plc, a total of 920 million cigarette packs were sold in Nigeria in 2015, of which 74 per cent were produced domestically.

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Nigeria has significant renewable water resources; however, the current reality is that most of it is poorly utilized and managed, thus raising important sustainability questions. There are several concerns associated with the water situation in the country such as pollution, flooding, poor drainage infrastructure, etc. All these have dire water-poverty, socio-economic, health and livelihood implications for Nigerians. This discussion paper identifies the absence of a properly functioning regulatory regime in Nigeria’s Water Resources sector - with the ensuing pattern of open-access water use in the country - as a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed. It briefly maps out some specifics of the current situation within Nigeria’s Water Resources sector. Utilising a simple steady-state economic framework that shows the implications of open access use of natural resources, it goes on to explain the sustainability implications of the current water resource use-patterns in Nigeria. Drawing on the points raised, the paper concludes with a few high-level recommendations for water sustainability in Nigeria.

Access to finance has been considered to be one of the important factors in influencing firms’ real activities and in promoting aggregates. However, literature on the relationship between finance and firm-level productivity is almost non-existent for African countries. This paper fills this gap by using cross-sectional firm-level data to estimate the effect of access to finance on labour productivity, total factor productivity (TFP), and the stochastic frontier trans-log model. This study also estimates an instrumental variable model - two-stage least square estimator to address potential endogeneity bias between access to credit and firms’ productivity. The results obtained show that the lack of access to finance, especially overdraft facilities negatively affects the productivity of firms in Africa. Also, smaller firms and sole-proprietorships are mostly affected because they have less access to finance. This study suggests that the development of a balanced financial system should be of topmost priority to policy makers. This ensures that more finance is channelled towards those firms whose productivity depends heavily on the availability of finance irrespective of their characteristics. This would result in firms increasing their investments in productivity-enhancing activities, which would benefit long-term economic growth.

Ending (extreme) poverty in all of its forms everywhere around the world continues to dominate the International Development Agenda (UN 2015). However, while poverty is declining in much of the developing world, data from the World Development Report (WDR) Conflict, Security, and Development reveal that fragile and conflict-affected states are lagging behind. The report points out that 'Poverty rates are 20 percentage points higher in countries affected by repeated cycles of violence over the last three decades. Indeed, with the worlds extreme poor over represented in fragile and conflict-affected ,some authors argue that violent conflict is development in reverse

Similar to most sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Nigeria has a huge infrastructure deficit which considerably limits efforts towards achieving inclusive growth, sustainable development, and poverty reduction. With infrastructure stock estimated at 20-25 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Nigerias infrastructure stock is still significantly lower than the recommended international benchmark of 70 per cent of GDP. The 2014 National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIMP) estimates that a total of US$ 3 trillion of investments, or US$100 billion annually, is required over the next 30 years to bridge Nigerias infrastructure gap. In particular, the Plan estimates that Nigeria will have to spend an annual average of US$ 33 billion infrastructure investments for the period 2014 -2018. This means that Nigeria will have to more than double its spending on infrastructure from the current 2-3 per cent of GDP to around 7 per cent to make appreciable progress in infrastructure development over the next three decades.