Given the magnitude and spread of
poverty, and the desire to curb its spread, there is a need to identify the
causes of poverty. In a brief definition, Johnson (1974) came up with two
conceptual sources of poverty, namely:
a)
Factors that
make the number of individuals in the consuming unit, larger in relation to the
amount of productive services the unit is able to supply. That is, t here is an
excessive family size in relation to income.
b)
Factors which
make the value of the productive services the household can supply, low
relative to the household needs or physical incapacity and discrimination in
terms of age colour, race or sex.
The CBN poverty Assessment and Alleviation study (1999) summarized
the causative factor of poverty as:
i.
The stage of
Economic and Social Development: Even when a country’s export earnings
might be abundant, situation of economic underdeveloped might pose a management
constraint on absorptive capacity or use of funds for development project which
are either not available, or properly targeted.
ii.Low Productivity: In this case, the consuming
unit (individuals of households) is unable to earn enough income which will
enable them to maintain adequate living standards. This would result from the
low utilization or low acquisition of human skills due to low education, poor health
or physical incapacity and inadequate access to productive assets. This lead to
unemployment and underemployment.
iii.
Market
Imperfections: These are factors which through institutional distortions,
would not allow equal access to productive assets and introduce forms of
discrimination that prevent the advancement of people. These factors could
arise from ignorance, culture, sex, age, race and so on. Market imperfections
also arise from distortions in the employment market, and skewed income
distribution structure that favours some classes in the society and renders the
less favoured class poorer.
iv.
Structural
Shift in the Economy: This results
from inadequate macroeconomic management policies in which undue concentration
is given to a particular sector of the economy, to almost total neglect of
others. In Nigeria’s
case, from independence (1960 to the 1970), her major export commodities were
cocoa, palm produce, rubber and groundnut (agricultural goods) which provide
jobs for rural poor. But by 1971, Nigeria’s structural shift occurred
in favour of crude oil, due to its greater foreign exchange earnings. As such,
the country became a mono-export country, such that agriculture suffered a
setback and mass poverty became the lot of the rural sector, and rural labour
alternative jobs in the urban cities.
v.Political Instability: The failure to
successfully actualize political transition programmes, result in social and
economic unrest domestically and internationally. Productive ventures are
unable to flourish with a restricted and market for sales, investments are
withdrawn, jobs are insecure, and the general citizenry faces economic
insecurity.
Corruption: in an attempt to measure corruption, a
non-governmental organization. Transparency international, developed the
perception of corruption in world countries on a scale of 10-1, where a score
of 10 implies that a country is free of corruption, and a score of 1 implies
that a country is completely corrupt in terms of its damaging impact on human
development. Corruption here refers to the ‘rush to share the national cake’,
in which public funds are collected and spend inefficiently, for no particular
purpose except to reward recipients.
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