At risk of sounding repetitive, Nigeria is now the official poverty capital of the world. Official according to the world poverty clock although the government is still waiting for official confirmation from our statisticians to know for sure. This poverty is expected to continue for a while as many are projecting that sub-Saharan Africa in…

The budget office released the 2017 budget implementation report a few weeks ago. It contained, as expected, some numbers on the federal government’s finances. Safe to say the numbers do not look good.

The history of off-shore banking is a very interesting one. Some claim that the ideas go all the way back to Channel Islands of France in the early 1800s. For others, it started once Switzerland became officially “neutral” in 1815.

In the last decade or so, research in economics has moved towards randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In simple English, these are experiments in which policies are carefully structured and implemented in a way that the impact can be properly measured.

In the run up to the 2015 elections, the former governor of the Central Bank, Prof. Charles Soludo, published what turned out to be a prophetic article.

The unemployment challenge has been the focus of policy discussions recently. Just to give a brief background of the problem, the unemployment rate has risen to 18.8 percent as at the third quarter of 2017, the last time we measured it.

You may not have heard, but there is an ongoing environmental disaster in Port-Harcourt. I’m not talking about the typical oil-bunkering related spills but something that is a lot more serious.

The big economic news over the last month was Nigeria’s refusal to sign up to the agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

We seem to be very fond of protectionist trade policy in Nigeria, especially with regards to food. We already know how the story goes. Ban the imports of a particular food because we could and should be producing it locally.

Human beings in general are lazy. We thrive on being able to get the most amount of benefits with the least amount of effort. Scientists argue that this is a feature left over from our time as hunter-gatherers when energy conservation was important.

I attended a conference in Montevideo a couple of years ago. It was my first time in a city where almost no one spoke any English, with Spanish being the lingua franca.

I was stuck at an airport for a couple of hours recently, thanks to an airline which I shall not name. Operational reasons. While there, I happened to eavesdrop on a conversation about industrial policy.