Democracy, Institutional Quality and Poverty in Nigeria
- Atsiya Pius Amos
- Adzugbele Shedrach Agbutun
- Daniel Anjola Wilson
- Taimako Sunday Anyuabaga
- ( paper pages. 135 - 152 )
Abstract
In
explaining the level of poverty in less developed countries, attention is
increasingly being focused on the roles of good governance and quality
institutions. While democracy is expected to reduce poverty through
redistribution and equitable access to resources, quality institutions can
incentivize human capital investment through the provision of public services
such as education and healthcare. Whether this is true for an emerging economy
like Nigeria will require robust empirical evidence. Hence, this study
investigates the impact of democracy and quality institutions on poverty in
Nigeria. It utilized data from the World Bank data catalogue (2023), World
Governance Indicators (2023), and the V-Dem Dataset (2023) spanning from 1990
to 2022. Using the Quantile Regression estimation technique, we found a robust positive and statistically strong relationship between weak
institutions and poverty. That is, a unit increase in the corruption index will
increase poverty by 18%. This statistically significant relationship between
institutions and poverty remained consistent when we redefined the democracy
variable by decomposing the V-Dem index. However, our results indicate that democracy
appears not to matter (0.054) in reducing poverty for the country. It is likely
that the effect of democracy is counteracted by the strong influence of weak
institutions.
Citation
Atsiya Pius Amos, Adzugbele Shedrach Agbutun, Daniel Anjola Wilson, Taimako Sunday Anyuabaga.
2025.
"Democracy, Institutional Quality and Poverty in Nigeria"
The Nigerian Journal of Economic and Social Studies,
67 (1): 135 - 152.
JEL Classification
D72, I32, P16
