Quality of Data Output From the Central Bank of Nigeria: Implications for Strategic and Long –Term Planning

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis to show the discrepancies in the data on federal budget balance. Another objective is to expose the inconsistency in the allocation of totally collected revenue to the federal, State and local tiers of government and to draw attention to the effects these data could have in strategic and long term planning prospects for Nigeria. For this purpose data on total federal expenditure, total federal revenue, total retained revenue and budget balance were gathered from the Central bank of Nigeria (CBN) covering the periods 1981 to 2014 and descriptive analytical tools were applied. It was concluded that the calculated budget balance by the author did not support the values declared as total budget balance for some years by the CBN for the same period. In addition, the percentage of total retained revenue to totally collected Federal revenue for the years under review, does not follow any consistent sharing formula. The recommendations include- associated with equipping research staff to be able to cope with the current demands of gathering and reporting primary financial data, precisely; and encouraging the public officers to embrace the study of Economics at whatever level it is convenient. This will help to clarify certain economic concepts that will be very useful to public officers when allocating scarce financial resources.

Keywords: long–run planning, Central Bank of Nigeria, Public finance data, Kremer’s O-Ring theory, strategic planning, chaos model.