..PDP Says Report Validates Its Position On Buhari’s Failure
Yemisi Izuora
Nigeria has been named alongside Venezuela, Iran, Brazil in the list of countries in the first 10 miserable nations in the world.
Nigeria was placed in the sixth position, in a report by Steve Hanke, an economist from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, United States
According to the report, Venezuela was listed as the most miserable country in the world, saying: “Venezuela holds the inglorious title of the most miserable country in the world in 2018, as it did in 2017, 2016, and 2015.”
Iran took third in the ranking while Brazil made it to the fourth position. Turkey took fifth position as the giant of Africa, Nigeria, emerged sixth.
The Misery Index was calculated using economic indices, including unemployment, inflation and bank lending rates.
For Nigeria, unemployment rate was the major contributing factor to its miserable state.
The report added: “The first Misery Index was constructed by an economist, Art Okun, in the 1960s as a way to provide President Lyndon Johnson of US with an easily digestible snapshot of the economy. That original Misery Index was just a simple sum of a nation’s annual inflation rate and its unemployment rate.
‘’The index has been modified several times, first by Robert Barro of Harvard University and then by myself. My modified Misery Index is the sum of the unemployment, inflation and bank lending rates, minus the percentage change in real GDP per capita.
“Higher readings on the first three elements are bad and make people more miserable. These are offset by a good (GDP per capita growth), which is subtracted from the sum of the ‘bads’. A higher Misery Index score reflects a higher level of misery, and it’s a simple enough metric that a busy president, without time for extensive economic briefings, can understand at a glance.
“The accompanying table contains Misery Index rankings for the 95 nations that report relevant data on a timely basis. For consistency and comparability, and with few exceptions, data were retrieved from the Economist Intelligence Unit.”
Meanwhile, In a statement by its spokesman, Kola Ologbondiyan, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP said that the global survey vindicates its position that the nation’s economy is in shambles under the current administration.