Living Standards and Industrial Clusters in Nigeria
This chapter gives a descriptive historic portrait and evolution of the case study, and its position within the political economy and urban context of Nigeria. It reviews and analyzes background information on poverty, unemployment, inequality, living sta
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Living Standards and Industrial Clusters in Nigeria
3.1
Introduction
A prominent and currently widely discussed issue shaping the development agenda is the rapid growth of Africa and other emerging economies. However, this growth has not only been accompanied by rising poverty and widening inequality but by low employment levels and in fact growing rates of unemployment. While the attainment of full productive employment has been the objective of national macroeconomic policies and the broader goals of global declarations, we have on the contrary witnessed widespread “jobless growth”.1 Conventional wisdom had always been that rapid economic growth will automatically lead to job growth; an assumption which may have derived from the earlier growth narrative following the end of the Second World War (World Bank, 1978).2 The example of rapid economic growth and attendant structural change was in some way an inspiration for the massive investment of the oil money to drive Nigeria’s public sector industrialization pathway of the 1970s. However, this broad growth narrative did not paint a full picture and there were considerable differences among developing nations deriving in large parts from their stages of development, the availability of skills to plan and execute large-scale
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The Copenhagen World Summit for Social Development in 1995 held out the prospects of the link between full productive employment and poverty reduction; also target 1B of Goal 1—to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger—of the 2000 Millennium Development Goals states: “Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people”. Both the 1995 World Summit as well as the revised 2008 MDGs restated the nexus of poverty and employment (http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/wssd/text-version/; United Nations, 2012, p. 6, 8). 2 This Report was a review of 25 years (1950–1975) of growth in developing countries accompanied by evident rise of per capita income in the range of 3 percent points per year doing so above population growth rates at the time. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 O. Oyeyinka, Industrial Clusters, Institutions and Poverty in Nigeria, Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41151-4_3
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3 Living Standards and Industrial Clusters in Nigeria
industrial projects, and their levels of institutional sophistication. While as the Report says virtually all developing countries recorded rise in per capita income through industry-driven growth, not all countries uniformly benefitted from growth with structural change. Nigeria, as will be detailed in this chapter recorded significant failures in its industrialization efforts, and with it, a worsening quality of life and slow employment growth. In this chapter a history of Nigeria’s industrialization pathways is provided with the objective of justifying clustering as an alternative pathway to development. The next section provides a narrative of Africa’s and Nigeria’s past and contemporary industrial
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