3 regional and socioeconomic patterns of poverty, the results are disaggregated by socio-economic groups.

This paper is made up of six sections, including the present Introduction section. Section II looks at the sources of data used for the study. Section III looks into household income and expenditure distribution in Nigeria and provides an interpretation of poverty indices and the calculation of a relative poverty line for Nigeria. Section IV makes up the core of this paper, presenting the spatial characteristics of poverty in Nigeria and how they have evolved over a seven year period from 1985 to 1992, indicating in which regions and states the poor are located in and the extent and severity of their poverty; the basic demographic characteristics of the poor including time use and employment patterns, describing in detail how these characteristics have evolved over the period; and how the poor feature in various sectors of the economy and the poverty decompositions, vulnerability and targeting; discusses how the changes in poverty could be explained by factors that are growth-related and those that are due to redistribution. Section V discusses the evolution of expenditures in Nigeria and explains how the patterns of expenditure correspond to poverty, by decomposing the sources of expenditure. Section VI concludes with some final remarks.

# **2. NATIONAL CONSUMER SURVEY**

The main data sets used in this study were collected by the Federal Office of Statistics (FOS) of Nigeria under the National Integrated Survey of Households (NISH). Both the 1985/86 and 1992/93 surveys were used to construct the poverty profile and consequent analysis. Both surveys start in April of the first year and end in March of the following year. The main objective of the data set is to provide periodic information to revise the consumer price index. The data on income is used to prepare a system of national accounts. The expenditure data and socioeconomic information are used to assess the impact of policy on general consumption patterns. The coverage of the data set is not as wide as one would wish, for detailed welfare and poverty analysis. For example, the surveys do not gather data to help analyze the production patterns of the poor, for the rural areas, the crop mix, the quality of their land, the value of their assets such as livestock, or even the degree to which they rely on wage labor compared to better off farmers. There is no information on the asset base typical of the poor and the sort of assets the poor lose first, when coping with survival crises. The lack of these indicators makes it difficult to build up a comprehensive picture of the capabilities and resources of the poor - in terms of physical assets and human resource endowment.

The 1985/86 sample is designed to be nationally representative. A two-stage stratified sample design is used. In the first stage, 1224 enumeration areas (EAs) were selected with probability proportional to the number of census households in the area. Stratification is done on rural/urban and state of residence basis. A total of 70 EAs comprising 40 from urban and 30 from rural were selected. From each EA 20 households were selected. In the second stage, sampled areas were randomly allocated to each month with 4 urban and 3 rural EAs.