Nigeria’s Most Stressed Out States
At Kingmakers.com.ng, we modelled our index after that of Bloomberg’s for the Most Stressed Countries in the world to find out which were the states in Nigeria were the most stressed out. Like Bloomberg’s stress test, we also used seven equally weighted variables:
· Violent Crime Rate: This was obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics’ Crime Statistics Report for 2016. The category of the reported crimes used was offences against persons, which they stated are those offences against human beings — e.g. murder, manslaughter, infanticide, concealment of birth, rape and other physical abuse, etc. We got the number of such crimes committed in each state, and divided it by the projected population for each state in 2016 and then multiplied it by 100,000 to get the violent crime rate.
· GDP per Capita: The 2015 GDP per capita projections as calculated by Kingmakers.com.ng was used. How the projections were arrived at could be found here.
· Income Inequality: Same as GDP per capita and the calculations for the projections could found on the Kingmakers.com.ng website.
· Corruption Prevalence: This was obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics Corruption Report for 2016. The prevalence rate was calculated by the number of people who reported paid a bribe divided by the projected population for the state in 2016.
· Unemployment Rate: Same as GDP per capita and the calculations for the projections could found on the Kingmakers.com.ng website.
· Environmental Pollution: We could not find any data on environmental pollution by state so we used the percentage of households in each that did not have any access to improved refuse collection as research has pointed out there is a direct correlation between how refuse is disposed of and environmental pollution. Same as GDP per capita and the calculations for the projections could found on the Kingmakers.com.ng site.
· Life Expectancy at Birth: Same as GDP per capita and the calculations for the projections could found on the Kingmakers.com.ng site.
States were allotted points for each variable based on their relative position in that category’s ranking. The states with the least-stressful measure for each variable received 1 point, while the country with the highest stress level received 37 points. All other countries were scored depending on their position between the two extremes. Points for the seven variables were totaled and scored on a percentile basis for a final score from 0 to 100, with a higher score indicating a more stressful living environment.
