The Aso Rock Index · Policy Lab

Scenario workbench

Ready

Test policy proposals against an agent-based model of the Nigerian economy. Each scenario simulates roughly 10,000 households and businesses across 30 timesteps, with feedback loops on employment, government finances, and sector growth. Use this to compare interventions, surface unintended consequences, and pressure-test fiscal assumptions before they hit the real world.

Scenario

Examples

Baseline parameters

GDP growth 3.5%
Inflation 19.0%
Initial unemployment 5.0%
Tax rate 25.0%
Defaults reflect Nigeria, early 2026. GDP growth from NBS/IMF WEO; inflation reflects CBN's 2025 disinflation campaign (post-rebased CPI); unemployment under the NBS rebased ILO methodology; tax rate is the personal income top marginal under the 2025 Nigeria Tax Act.
Target sector n/a
Household welfare support
n/a
Key sector investment
n/a
n/a
1 Interpret scenario
2 Run simulation
3 Draft briefing
Final unemployment
n/a
n/a
Target sector growth
n/a
n/a
Low-income change
n/a
n/a
Government budget
n/a
Negative = deficit

The briefing will appear here after a scenario runs.

Households by income tier

Low
Medium
High

Businesses

Unemployment rate

Government budget

Step Low Medium High Businesses Unemp. Gov budget

The model

An agent-based simulation. Each scenario starts with about 10,000 agents (households split into low, medium, and high income tiers; businesses), runs for 30 timesteps, and lets each agent decide independently whether to expand, dissolve, or hold based on macro conditions and the policy parameters.

The macroeconomy is endogenous: unemployment moves with population growth relative to GDP growth; the government's budget tracks tax revenue from expansions minus welfare and sector-investment spending; sectoral growth feeds back into business confidence.

The workflow

(1) An analysis layer reads your plain-English scenario and extracts two numerical policy levers, household welfare support and key-sector investment, plus a named target sector. (2) The simulator runs entirely in your browser; nothing leaves the page during the simulation. (3) An economist-style briefing is generated against the simulation output, with a verdict.

Baseline

Macroeconomic baselines default to early 2026 Nigerian figures from the NBS, CBN, and IMF World Economic Outlook. Sensitivity parameters (how much each income tier reacts to inflation, unemployment, and welfare support) come from the standard parameterisation in the literature on Nigerian household economics.

What this isn't

A directional simulator, useful for comparing policies against each other, not a quantitative forecast. The model is intentionally simple. Real economies have more feedback loops, and Nigerian-specific shocks (oil price, FX, security, climate) are exogenous. Treat outputs as ordinal: this would likely be better or worse than that, not "this will be exactly X% growth."