Oluyomi Ola-David Insights

Deep within Nigeria's and Africa's inundating socio-economic problems lay streams of opportunities and potential for socio-economic strengthening. However, more often than not, a considerable majority of indigenous populations, who may be without visionary perspectives, merely bemoan the numerous challenges. Thankfully, the inflow of human capital and financial capital from oversea territories increasingly serve to jolt local sleeping giants to action. For instance, soon after a stream of foreign-owned firms expanded the output of the Nigerian telecommunications sector at the turn of the century, an indigenous telecommunications firm emerged to claim part of the market share. Moreover, several cases of knowledge spillovers from 'foreign presence' in various industries are apparent in the recent development history of Rwanda, Madagascar, and Kenya amongst others. In the light of these, foreign direct investment as well as portfolio inflows to Africa's largely untappe

By the 2014 rebasing of its GDP, Nigeria became Africa’s largest economy trumping its long time contender, South Africa. Amongst several things, the significant growth implies changes in the sectoral contribution of domestic output and employment. Conventionally, for a developing country context it is expected that international trade, foreign direct investment, industrial policy and global price fluctuations would have contributed to the shifts in the distribution of factors of production and final output. Given the uninclusive nature of the impressive surge in output, it is important to investigate what sectors accounted for the structural change. Using historical data on the Nigerian economy, Oyebanke and I examined (in a forthcoming paper) the contribution of foreign direct investment to structural transformation. Specifically, in the paper we provided answers to the following questions: What are the sources, nature and characteristics of the structural change