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The Economic Impact of the Nigerian Civil War: a Reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

E. Wayne Nafzier
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Kansas State University, Manhattan

Extract

I am grateful to Dr F. S. O'Brien for pointing out my error in interpretation of Nigerian gross domestic product (G.D.P.) during the war. His correction also helps to resolve a contradiction between my treatment of Biafran territory and my statement that ‘Other factors accounting for the slow growth were the drop in oil and manufacturing output in the secessionist East.’

Type
Africana
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

Page 463 note 1 Nafziger, E. Wayne, ‘The Economic Impact of the Nigerian Civil War’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), x, 2, 07 1972, pp. 227–8.Google Scholar

Page 464 note 1 Okigbo, P. N. C., Nigerian National Accounts, 1950–57 (Enugu, Federal Ministry of Economic Development, 1962), pp. 3598Google Scholar; Nigeria, Office of Statistics, Gross Domestic Product of Nigeria, 1968/69–1966/67 (Lagos, 1968), pp. 3–24; and Nigeria, Ministry of Information, Second National Development Plan, 1970–74 (Lagos, 1971), pp. 20 and 43–5.Google Scholar Wolfgang F. Stolper, Head of the Economic Planning Unit in preparing tin. First National Development Plan, 1961–68, characterised plan formulation with Nigeria's aggregate economic statistics as Planning Without Facts: lessons in resource allocation from Nigeria's development (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 6, 41, and 91137.Google Scholar In addition, there were sources of inaccuracies (above those in ‘normal’ years) in Nigerian national-income accounts during the war, 1967–8 to 1969–70, resulting from the lack of documentation in Biafran territory. O. Aboyade, Chief Planning Officer of the Ministry of Economic Development, and A. Ayida, then Permanent Secretary of the same Ministry, indicate that ‘the correct story of [gross product originating in the secessionist areas during the war] may never be fully told’. ‘The War Economy in Perspective’, in The Nigerian Journal of Economic and Social Studies (Ibadan), XIII, 1, 03 1971, p. 28.Google Scholar

Page 464 note 2 Nafziger, loc. cit. p. 227, mentions ‘deficiencies in the compilation and estimation of aggregate domestic data in Nigeria’.

Page 464 note 3 Ibid. p. 227.

Page 464 note 4 I use ‘capital exhaustion’ to refer to capital consumption (mainly) plus capital destruction, since there is apparently no term in the literature for the two combined.

Page 464 note 5 Kuznets, Simon S., National Product in Wartime (New York, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1945), pp. 6 and 20.Google Scholar

Page 464 note 6 Nafziger, loc. cit. p. 242, and Nigeria, , Ministry of Information, Economic and Statistical Review, 1970 (Lagos 1971), p. 3.Google Scholar