Leadership and Growth

The book reviews Nigeria’s growth performance and its impact on the labor market and proposes a growth strategy aimed at further accelerating growth and enhancing the growth elasticity of employment. The growth strategy rests on three pillars:

• Targeted interventions to address binding constraints in value chains with high growth and employment potential. These binding constraints include poor physical infrastructure and investment climate, lack of access to finance, pervasive skills gaps, and restrictive trade policies. Successful interventions in these value chains need to be designed based on an assessment of what is most relevant, feasible, cost-effective and provides the greatest near and medium-term benefits. To be effective, these interventions should emanate from a dialogue with the private sector and allow for swift correction and suitable governance arrangements.

• Comprehensive reform of the technical and vocational education system: This will be needed not only to create conditions for more rapid growth, but also to combat youth unemployment. Private sector-led approaches to improved vocational training, where the government plays the role of standardizing curricula and accrediting programs, are the most promising route for reform.

• Trade policy reform. Import bans and high tariff barriers substantially increase the cost of doing business in value chains with high employment potential. Further trade liberalization will be essential to allow a restructuring of the economy towards sectors where Nigeria is globally competitive.
  

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