Discuss The Informal Private Sector In Nigeria

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Olayiwola (2001), noted that anyone who is an employer or self-employed and who does not belong to the government or public sector in Nigeria is believed to be operating in the private sector. The sizes of private enterprises vary from micro and small-scale enterprises (which are predominantly informal) to medium and large-scale enterprises in Nigeria. Eleazu (1996) and Anyanwu (1997) classified the Nigerian private sector into two sub-sectors; the organized (formal) private sector and the unorganized (informal) private sector. The organized (formal) private sector in Nigeria include most activities in manufacturing, mining, construction, commerce, finance and the incorporated part of road transportation. These are usually coordinated under …show more content…

The unorganized (informal) sub-sector consists of indigenous economic activities such as food processing, barbing, shoe shining, hairdressing, mechanic repair works, crafts, small scale industries, and retailing (Abumere, 1998:6). The informal sub-sector in Nigeria contains millions of individual proprietors, petty traders, artisans, self employed craftsmen and unit transport operators (Obadan, 1993: 14). The informal private enterprises often help to reduce the marginal private cost of trading by expanding their members’ assess to transport and credit facilities, collecting, processing, and disseminating information that individual members might have found difficult to acquire on their own, and processing where the government does not provide the necessary institutional and physical market structure. In terms of size, the Nigerian informal private sector is obviously large and it is larger than the formal/organized private sector (Abumere 2002: 5). Fapohunda (1975) put the estimate of the informal sector in Nigeria in terms of total employment between 50 and 75 percent. The size of the informal Sector (relative to the formal sector) is however, an indicator of the low level of development since it suggests an inverse relationship between the size of informal sector and the level of economic development. This poses a challenge for development process and effort, as the informal sector constitute a policy target for private sector development

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