Unveiling the Asymmetric Nexus: Monetary Policy and Income Inequality in Nigeria

Olufemi Gbenga Onatunji and Anthony Akinlo

Global Journal of Emerging Market Economies, 2025, vol. 17, issue 3, 413-430

Abstract: Over the past few years, the deterioration in income distribution has remained a significant impediment to achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 10 (SDG-10), thereby necessitating a global policy discourse among policymakers and scholars to make collaborative commitments to address income inequality concerns. While there is growing scholarly evidence on the linkages between monetary policy and income inequality, empirical examination of asymmetric monetary–income inequality remains elusive in the literature. This study seeks to address this gap in the literature by exploring the asymmetric nexus between monetary policy and income inequality in Nigeria from 1980 to 2020 employing a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) approach. The empirical outcomes demonstrate that the adoption of both monetary policy stances has different effects on income inequality in Nigeria. Specifically, the findings indicate that resorting to contractionary (interest rate) and expansionary (money supply) monetary policies is more effective in ameliorating income inequality in Nigeria. This research offers insightful implications for policymakers regarding the implementation of effective monetary policy and equitable distribution of income in Nigeria. JEL Classification D31, E17, E42

Keywords: Monetary policy; income inequality; asymmetric effects; cointegration; nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag; Nigeria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09749101251316738 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:emeeco:v:17:y:2025:i:3:p:413-430

DOI: 10.1177/09749101251316738

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Global Journal of Emerging Market Economies from Emerging Markets Forum
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().