2022, Vol. 7, Issue 4, Part A
The dynamic relationship between unemployment and regional migration of labor in Nigeria
Author(s): Seun Adebowale Adebanjo and Pius Sibeate
Abstract: Regional migration is the movement of people from one geographic location to another in search of a higher standard of living due to social unrest and violence. Due to the high unemployment rate caused by the covivirus-19 pandemic, the rate of migration in this age has accelerated significantly.This study's primary purpose is to examine the dynamic relationship between unemployment and regional migration in Nigeria. From 1991 to 2020, secondary data will be retrieved from the World Bank's database of world development indicators (data.worldbank.org) for Nigeria's inflation, GDP growth, and wages, and from www.macrotrends.net for Nigeria's unemployment rate and migration rate. It is crucial to note that migration in this study encompasses both internal and external migration, as the available data for migration is net migration, which includes both types.This study uses the unit root test to demonstrate that unemployment becomes stationary at zero level without the use of series differentiation. Using the augmented Dickey-Fuller technique, migration becomes stationary after the second difference, indicating integration of order 2, whereas GDP growth, inflation, and wage become stationary after the first difference.OLS indicates that the regression model was statistically significant. This suggests that unemployment, migration, GDP growth, inflation, and compensation have a strong relationship. R-squared = 0.7913 indicates that migration and other controlled variables such as GDP growth, inflation, and wage growth can explain approximately 79% of the variance in unemployment. This demonstrates that the model fits the data well and is ideal for predicting the future unemployment rate. In the meantime, the regression model indicates that migration is statistically significant and, consequently, has a statistically significant positive effect on unemployment in Nigeria. The estimated coefficient for migration is 36.785, which indicates that unemployment will increase by approximately 37 per cent for every one per cent increase in migration. The augmented dickey fuller test was then used to determine if the series is stationary or not. The Johansen cointegration test was then utilized to conduct a cointegration analysis, revealing a long-run relationship between unemployment, migration, GDP growth, inflation, and wage.Figure 1 depicts, on the other hand, a significant rise in inflation from 1991 to 1995, followed by a fall until 1996, and then a consistent fluctuation in the inflationary rate from 1996 to 2020. In addition, the graph illustrates that from 1991 to 2020, salary growth and GDP growth were not steady. Unemployment, however, has suddenly increased from 2015 to 2020 and appears to have peaked in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic (see figure 1).Consequently, it is suggested that the government implement policies that will increase productivity, which will create gainful employment and raise the standard of living of citizens throughout the country's geopolitical zones, thereby enhancing migration management and releasing Nigeria's greater economic potential.
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How to cite this article:
Seun Adebowale Adebanjo, Pius Sibeate. The dynamic relationship between unemployment and regional migration of labor in Nigeria. Int J Stat Appl Math 2022;7(4):42-49.