Roubini on Nigeria vs. South Africa | NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Roubini on Nigeria vs. South Africa

This was your first trip to Nigeria. What were your impressions?

Nouriel Roubini : I had low expectations because usually what you read in the US press about Nigeria is only bad news, violence, terrorism, lots of other bad stuff. I was actually positively surprised. You have a country that has one tenth of the power capacity of South Africa, one quarter or one fifth of the infrastructure of South Africa, and while South Africa is growing barely at 2%-2.5%, Nigeria is growing at around 7% or so.

Of course it’s an unfair comparison because South Africa is a middle-income country while Nigeria has a low per capita income, so usually low per capita income countries grow faster because there is a catch-up of growth. Nigeria has oil and gas and a lot of energy that helps its growth. Since they are doing so well with such little power and infrastructure, some people say that Nigeria could grow by 10% by making the right investment in infrastructure. - in africanbusinessmagazine

Nouriel Roubini is an American professor of Economics at New York University`s Stern School of Business and chairman of RGE Roubini Global Economics

Nouriel Roubini, (born March 29, 1958, Istanbul, Turkey), Turkish-born American economist and educator who was best known for predicting the 2007–08 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and the subsequent global financial crisis.

Born to Iranian Jewish parents, Roubini moved with his family to Iran and Israel before they settled in Italy in 1962. After a year at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he studied economics at Bocconi University in Milan (B.A., 1982) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1988), where he specialized in macroeconomics and international economics. He joined the economics faculty at Yale University in 1988 and taught there until 1995, when he moved to New York University. He also served as a visiting scholar to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), held single-year terms on the White House Council of Economic Advisers (1998–99) and at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (1999–2000), and cofounded (2004) the consulting firm Roubini Global Economics. Roubini spent much of his early career studying countries that experienced extreme economic failures, such as Mexico (in 1994), Thailand and other countries associated with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Russia (1998), and Argentina (2000). He determined that each shared one common element: a massive current account deficit.(www.britannica.com)

Nouriel Roubini is the Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, LLC, his own global macroeconomic consultancy firm. He is also a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Dr. Roubini has extensive policy experience as well as broad academic credentials. From 1998 to 2000, he served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then the senior advisor to the undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, helping to resolve the Asian and global financial crises, among other issues. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and numerous other prominent public and private institutions have drawn upon his consulting expertise.