Contributions of Entrepreneurship to the Development of the Nigerian Economy

This study evaluates entrepreneurship's contributions to Nigeria's economy from 2000 to 2024. The primary aim is to assess its influence on national growth, with specific focus on entrepreneurial financing, government support and policy, and entrepreneurship education and training. The theoretical framework integrates Schumpeter’s Innovation Theory (emphasizing innovation's role in development), the Resource-Based View (RBV; stressing creative resource use), and Institutional Theory (examining formal and informal structures shaping entrepreneurship). Employing an ex post facto design, the study analyzes secondary data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), and World Development Indicators (WDI). Results show statistically significant impacts from entrepreneurial financing (p = 0.03), government support and policy (p = 0.00), and education/training (p = 0.00) on economic development. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and Breusch-Pagan-Godfrey (BPG) heteroscedasticity test confirm a long-run relationship between entrepreneurship and key economic indicators. The study concludes that entrepreneurship drives Nigeria's development via job creation, innovation, and industrial diversification. It recommends that government and private sectors expand funding, strengthen policy coherence, and bolster entrepreneurship education to build an inclusive ecosystem for sustainable growth.