Introduction: Towards Evidence-based Policy

Paul Collier, Catherine Pattillo and Chukwuma C. Soludo

A chapter in Economic Policy Options for a Prosperous Nigeria, 2008, pp 1-9 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Economic policy choices profoundly affect the lives of ordinary people. Nigeria is fortunate to have huge opportunities: oil provides large public resources; Nigerians succeed the world over as entrepreneurs; Lagos is a superbly located big city that could rival the exporting cities of Asia. The choice of economic policies determines whether these opportunities are harnessed or dissipated. Nigerians are poor today because of mistaken choices over the past thirty years. Since 2003 the society has begun to correct past mistakes, but policy reform is a continuous process and despite some remarkable successes many issues remain to be addressed. Choices tend to go wrong if they are founded on hunches, special interests, beliefs or textbooks. They need to be based on evidence. The purpose of this book is to show that there is already plenty of evidence from Nigerian experience that can inform policy discussion. In a democracy, economic policy ultimately rests upon popular understanding of the issues. In the vacuum created by a lack of hard evidence, rogue nostrums thrive and confuse. Hence, this book is written not for an audience of technocrats but for all who wish to engage with policy choices.

Keywords: Policy Climate; Monetary Union; Federal System; Agricultural Export; Dutch Disease (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-0-230-58319-1_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230583191

DOI: 10.1057/9780230583191_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().