How to interpret Nigeria’s new labour force numbers
Key questions this article answers:
- After two years of silence, Nigeria's statistics agency released its revised Labour Force Statistics Report (LFSR) for Q4 2022 and Q1 2023. What are the changes in the methodology and results?
- According to the new methodology, Nigeria’s unemployment rate was 4.1% as of Q1 2023. What does this mean for national economic planning?
Last week, Nigeria’s statistics office released the highly anticipated and revised Labour Force Statistics Report (LFSR) for Q4 2022 and Q1 2023. According to the report based strictly on a new methodology, about three-quarters of working-age Nigerians were employed—73.6% in Q4 2022 and 76.7% in Q1 2023. This reveals that most people were engaged in a job for at least one hour a week for pay or profit.
Although Stears projected Nigeria’s unemployment rate to be 5.8% using 2020’s figures, the actual figure reported by the NBS was slightly better at 5.3%. Remarkably, according to the NBS, this rate improved further to 4.1% in Q1 2023, despite a botched naira redesign policy by the Central Bank that negatively impacted the economy.
As we (Stears) also pointed out, these figures are incomparable with older unemployment figures printed at 33.3% in Q4 2020 due to the National Bureau of Statistics’ (NBS) newly
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