Ominira Initiative Free Trade Fellow Victor Ejechi has written in The Cable criticising Nigeria’s embrace of costly import bans. He argues that such restrictions have often increased consumer costs, encouraged smuggling, reduced government revenue, and failed to deliver meaningful industrial growth.
Victor wrote:
“The World Bank examined Nigeria’s prohibitions in 2012, when 24 groups of items were banned, and found exactly that: the bans hurt the poorest quartile hardest, their effect on jobs was unclear, and replacing them with ordinary tariffs could lift more than four million Nigerians out of poverty.
“We have run this experiment on rice, on poultry and on cloth. We know how it ends…Nigerians have been paying it for more than twenty years, and the factories we were promised are still exactly where we left them.”
Read the full piece here.
Ominira Initiative Free Trade Fellow Victor Ejechi has written in The Cable criticising Nigeria’s embrace of costly import bans. He argues that such restrictions have often increased consumer costs, encouraged smuggling, reduced government revenue, and failed to deliver meaningful industrial growth.
Victor wrote:
“The World Bank examined Nigeria’s prohibitions in 2012, when 24 groups of items were banned, and found exactly that: the bans hurt the poorest quartile hardest, their effect on jobs was unclear, and replacing them with ordinary tariffs could lift more than four million Nigerians out of poverty.
“We have run this experiment on rice, on poultry and on cloth. We know how it ends…Nigerians have been paying it for more than twenty years, and the factories we were promised are still exactly where we left them.”
Read the full piece here.
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