Quote: (06-13-2013 01:06 PM)Athlone McGinnis Wrote:
Quote: (06-13-2013 07:31 AM)Moma Wrote:
Athlone - I do agree on the cultural aspect playing a major influence though but money wise, I'm not too sure about wealth.
I know Nigeria has far more money than Jamaica but I'm not sure how much of it they divulge towards track.
Ghana seems to have better money management than Nigeria and I am pretty sure they have more money than Jamaica.
On a per capita basis those nations are nowhere near Jamaica when it comes to wealth. Jamaica has a per capita GDP of about $9100. Ghana boasts a figure of about $3300, and Nigeria just $2700. The average Jamaican has much more money than the average citizen in either of those two countries. They are larger nations and may possess more money overall, but that means little when the per capita figures are so low (lots of money spread out over too few people to do too many things). Jamaica is in a much better (though still dire) financial situation right now than those nations. Ghana is the likeliest to close this gap, but that will take time.
Jamaica is also a far more developed country with significantly higher living standards than either of them. When I speak of "development", I refer to better services, better infrastructure, better healthcare, higher life expectancy and better overall records of governance in general (though Ghana doesn't do badly at all in that last regard). These things all make a difference when it comes to sports development.
Keep in mind that for Nigerian stats are very underrepresented. There is no real way of gathering data there for a nation so large and fragmented plus many Nigerians generate much income off the books via person to person transactions in cash.
Jamaica for its size is better able to prove more well rounded stats due to its modest size, because if you go onto the ground in Nigeria you will see a very large middle class whom have sizable disposable incomes.
To put it bluntly a large majority of Nigerian residents don't even partake in the economy. There is a sub-layer and other sub-layer of self-sufficient industries they take part in. You have islamic nomads in the north that do nothing but trade crops amongst each other, while you have tycoons that have more wealth stashed away in Europe then all of what Jamaica has in the bank, the disparity is of the charts and maybe only rivaled by Brazil.
My point is the millions whom do partake into the economy are blowing Jamaicans out of the water as far as wealth goes.
Nobody even knows what the real population of the country is, they just throw ballpark estimates out. It's impossible to scale a realistic GDP projection for Nigeria it's truly the wild west out there.