Solid Mineral Resources: Alternative Source of Revenue for the Nigerian Economy
The mining of solid minerals in Nigeria accounts for only 3% of its GDP, due to the influence of its vast oil resources. The domestic mining industry is grossly underdeveloped and that necessitate the need to import mineral resources that could be produced at home such as bitumen, iron ore, salt etc. The Nigeria government is presently controlling the sector but given rights to corporate organizations to mine and sell mineral resources. This paper tries to expose the potentiality in solid mineral resources as viable alternative to the petroleum sector, which production in Nigeria is unpredictable and the crisis in the region that produce the oil make unreliable as source earning for the country. This paper further shows areas where full private ownership or in partnership with federal, state or local communities can be encouraged, so as to fully developed the sector and generate a reasonable foreign exchange for the government and serve as an input to other sectors of the Nigerian economy. The study intends to provides additional sources of revenue for the government in view of the crisis in the oil producing region of the country and the study further show the available revenue generating options available to the government of Nigeria.
THE SOLID MINERAL RESOURCES OF NIGERIA: MAXIMIZING UTILIZATION FOR INDUSTRIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL GROWTH
The choice of a topic for tonight’s lecture has not been easy at all. Should I pontificate on the deplorable state of geoscience departments in our Universities, the dearth of unemployed geology graduates in our system or a plate-tectonic explanation of why most of Nigeria oil is found in the south-eastern and only a token quantity in the south-western Niger Delta, or why most of our solid mineral resources are located in the Northern parts of the country. As a Professor of Geology at ATBU, the above topics fall within the realm of my profession. However, it is as an economic and environmental geologist that I have attained this position. Hence, my choice of subject must necessarily reflect this position. I decided to tell you about the solid mineral resources and resource potentials of Nigeria and how these are being deplored, exploited and applied in modern technology and industry. We shall touch on the promise these mineral raw materials hold in the new millennium for exciting new applications in material science, chemical technology and industry for economic and technological advancement of our nation.
Monte Carlo properties of spatial dependence LM tests
This paper compares the power and size of both spatial one-directional and robust to local misspecification LM test using Monte Carlo techniques under different set ups. Confirming the results found in Anselin et al . (1996), under local misspecification the robust LM test improves its size and power of tests. However, under no misspecification, the robust LM test is severely penalized and the usual one-directional LM test has a much better performance.