THE INFLUENCE OF RISING POPULATION ON POVERTY AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN NIGERIA

Abstract

This work studies the influence of rising population on Poverty and Unemployment in Nigeria using Autoregressive Distributed Lag Bounds (ARDL) approach on annual data from 1980-2018. It explores the dynamic relationship between population growth and selected macroeconomic variables of economic growth, poverty, and unemployment as well as the direction of causality between them. The study also found that population growth and its components exerts a negative impact on the overall economic conditions in Nigeria. It was recommended that there should be an intervention by the government and NGOs by way of sensitizing the public on the importance and benefits of having a reduced number of children, by providing better policies to encourage investment and saving and providing an enabling environment that will help curb high fertility rate, thus leading to a decline in dependency ratio and poverty.