Nigeria Set To Become Africa’s Biggest Economy

[JI7]

Source: bbc

Nigeria is to “rebase” its gross domestic product (GDP) on Sunday 6 April, which should push it above South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy.

The United Nations defines rebasing as the “process of replacing present price structure [base year] to compile volume measures of GDP with a new or more recent base year”. Basically, it’s a need to update a country’s national statistics.

Rebasing is necessary simply because economies change over time. Different goods are produced and new technology is introduced, so rebasing means that the statistics give the most up-to-date picture of an economy as possible. Most country do it at least every three years or so. But Nigeria’s old GDP base year is 1990.

Back then, the country had one telecoms operator with perhaps 300,000 phone lines. Now it has a whole mobile phone industry with tens of millions of subscribers. So without rebasing the statistics from the mobile phone sector, it would remain somewhat under-represented.

Likewise, 24 years ago there was only one airline. Now there are a whole plethora, the information of which needs to be captured better in the national figures.
Some analysts say that switching the base year to 2010 will boost the country’s GDP by as much as 65% – on paper.



Read more: http://thestreetjournal.org/2014/04/nigeria-set-to-become-africas-biggest-economy/

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one still has to keep in mind that Nigeria's population is much larger than South Africa so when you take that into account Nigeria still has some way to go .

[CFLDem]

1. Won't be so big once the Ebola epidemic comes through

or so I'm told by the mainstream media.

[rickyhall]

2. Does the US do this or does it need to?

[JI7]

3. you mean "rebase" ?

yes, the US does it more regularly . it takes a lot of resources to do it which is why nigeria hasn't done it for almost 25 years.

[Ken Burch]

4. Does this include all the proceeds from those emails asking for help for that "prince"?

[blkmusclmachine]

5. Nigeria is still jailing its gay citizens???

[theHandpuppet]

6. Oh yes.

Nigeria's anti-gay laws are comparably despicable to those of Uganda but because Nigeria has resources the West wants (primarily oil and offshore drilling contracts), there won't be the same kind of official outrage for Nigeria as that aimed at Uganda. Meanwhile, if you're gay and living in Nigeria, feel free to be dragged from your home in the middle of the night and whipped in the streets.

[malthaussen]

9. Nigeria has always been a hellhole...

... but as you say, because they have what we want, they can persecute and kill one another with relative impunity. Well, I guess there's only so much outrage to go around.

-- Mal

[BumRushDaShow]

7. "Nigeria's population is much larger than South Africa"

In recent times, they have always had the largest population on the continent (up to 168 million as of 2012).

If anything, it's the oil industry and like the rest of the world (including here), you have the very rich and the very poor. The media prefers to continue to insist the entire continent is essentially dead and buried... ignoring all of the cities and the brand new airports they flew into and 5-star hotels they stayed in... all on the way to their offering an imagery that is not what is before their eyes.

What negatively impacts Nigeria is the continual battle between the Muslim north and the Christian south.

[Paladin]

8. Lotsa oil & gas in Nigeria. (nt)