The Political Economy of Entrepreneurship in Nigeria: How State-Business Relations Shape the Entrepreneurial Landscape Across Geopolitical Zones

This dissertation analyses the political economy of entrepreneurship in Nigeria, examining how state-business relations, patronage networks, and political settlements across the country's six geopolitical zones differentially shape the entrepreneurial landscape and produce the significant between-zone variation in entrepreneurial activity quality and density observed across the country. Entrepreneurship research has engaged insufficiently with political economy analysis, treating the business environment as an institutional context defined by regulatory quality rather than as a politically structured arena shaped by power relations between state actors and economic elites. This theoretical limitation is particularly costly for Nigerian entrepreneurship research, where the character of state-business relations varies substantially across zones and where political patronage networks intersect with entrepreneurial activity in ways that shape opportunity structures, market access, and competitive dynamics. The dissertation employs a comparative historical analysis methodology, combining structured comparative case analysis of entrepreneurial development trajectories across the six zones from independence to the present with contemporary empirical research including elite interviews with 40 business and political leaders and econometric analysis of enterprise census data. The theoretical contribution is an original Political Economy of Entrepreneurship framework that integrates varieties of capitalism theory, political settlement analysis, and institutional theory to explain zone-level variation in entrepreneurial landscape characteristics. The framework generates a typology of state-business relationship configurations and their associated entrepreneurship outcomes that extends existing comparative entrepreneurship theory. Keywords: political economy, state-business relations, entrepreneurship, Nigeria, geopolitical zones.