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,
