Measuring inequalities in Africa's largest economy

Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa but the poorest people on the continent live there. With increased political stability, economists believe the country’s development indicators would further improve. However, experience and data shows that the inequality gap broadens. It then becomes necessary to further analyse the Gini coefficient over decades on the one hand, and determine if the Lorenz curve means anything to the ontological perception of the Nigerian people. The next argument is to determine when the Lorenz curve turns to societal poverty. The inequality from the Lorenz curve interpretation is then viewed within the context of the “western” realization (Lessem and Schieffer, 2010) path of their integral research model, more so, from the angle of critical realism. Thus, the research method, or rather critique is ‘critical realism’ because it “constitute ontology based on experience, as expressed in the concept of the empirical world and mediated by the ideas of the actuality of causal laws” (Bhaskar 1975).

According to the scale independence principle, the size of an economy is not dependent on the measure of inequality (Todaro and Smith 2009). Thus, the measure of the dispersion of income rather than magnitude is of much more importance in emerging Nigeria. More importantly, however, is the perception of aggrieved Nigerians and the degree of marginalization that has led to such an inequality gap. These social factors may not be detected in the Lorenz curve or even the GDP, or rather, may not be explained in details in such a manner that political and entrepreneurial actors may start to find feasible solution to inequalities. The poverty created from decades of inequality in Nigeria needs a different type of analysis by learning from the integral research framework, most specifically the comparison between theory and reality. The expected result then, is to determine the relationship between GDP growth and income inequality in Nigeria. Critical realism then becomes an appropriate research method since Bhaskar’s three domains of ‘real’, ‘actual’, and ‘empirical’ effectively blends qualitative and quantitative research in the most unique manner.