Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And if you want to download other editions of this programme, you can find it at bbcworldservice.com slash moreorless.
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.
I'm Ruth Alexander.
And I'm Charlotte MacDonald.
We recently dedicated a whole programme to answering a handful of questions from listeners around the world.
This week's programme is inspired by two questions from listeners in Africa.
So people have been saying for some time now that Nigeria is about to become Africa's biggest economy.
Well, yes, now it has happened.
The most widely recognised measure of the size of a country's economy is GDP, gross domestic product.
And if you'd asked us at the beginning of April which economy was bigger, Nigeria or South Africa, we'd have said that Nigeria's GDP was about $260 billion and South Africa's $370 billion.
So South Africa then was the biggest.
So how did that happen?
Well, Nigeria didn't have a huge growth spurt over a weekend.
Instead, its National Bureau of Statistics carried out a major overhaul of how the country's GDP figures are calculated.
The technical name for this is rebasing.
And Razia Khan, head of Africa Global Research at Standard Chartered Bank, says it was about time it happened.
So why is the new official GDP figure for Nigeria so much bigger than expected?
It's because there were some big unknowns.
Much of Nigeria's economic activity is informal and goes unrecorded.
Showing 1641–1660 of 4,250 · page 83 of 213
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