The Rule of Law and Entrepreneurship Development in Nigeria: The Role of Governance Quality

This study examined the impact of the Rule of Law and the Role of Governance Quality on entrepreneurship development in Nigeria from 1998 to 2022. This research appropriated the use of Auto Regressive Distributed Lag to empirically investigate the rule of law and the role of governance quality on the dependent variable Entrepreneurial Development (ED) using data sourced from 1998 – 2022. The independent variables include; Gross Domestic Product per Capita (GDP/C), Inflation (INFL), Governance Effectiveness (GE), Regulatory quality (RQ), and the rule of law (RL). The study shows that the natural log of GDP/C is statistically significant and has a positive relationship with entrepreneurship development while Despite being statistically significant, INFL & ED have a negative relationship. Meanwhile, RL has a positive attribute but a statistically insignificant relationship with ED and a statistically negatively insignificant relationship exists between GE, RQ, and ED. The study recommends the Government must deliberately work towards reforming the legal system to have an effective Rule of Law, and improve regulatory quality and governance effectiveness that will lead to economic efficiency and improved living standards. Keywords: Entrepreneurship Development, Economic growth, Rule of law, Start-up, Innovation