Intellectual Property Rights Regimes, Technology Licensing, and Innovation Outcomes in Nigeria’s Pharmaceutical Industry: A Comparative Institutional Analysis

This dissertation conducts a comparative institutional analysis of intellectual property rights regimes, technology licensing arrangements, and innovation outcomes in Nigeria's pharmaceutical industry, developing an original framework for understanding how institutional configurations shape pharmaceutical innovation trajectories in middle-income developing economies. Nigeria's pharmaceutical industry sits at the intersection of competing institutional pressures: international TRIPS agreement obligations that protect multinational patent holders, public health imperatives demanding affordable access to essential medicines, and industrial policy ambitions for domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing capability upgrading. The study employs a comparative institutionalist methodology combining quantitative analysis of pharmaceutical patent filing data, technology licensing agreement records, and innovation output indicators sourced from NAFDAC, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and industry association databases from 2000 to 2023, with qualitative institutional analysis drawing on 50 elite interviews with pharmaceutical executives, NAFDAC officials, patent lawyers, and WHO representatives. The theoretical framework integrates the varieties of capitalism perspective, the institutional complementarity theory of innovation systems, and the international technology transfer literature. The dissertation develops an original Pharmaceutical Innovation Regime Typology specific to middle-income developing economy contexts, identifying four configurations of IPR strength, licensing access, and innovation outcome patterns that advance beyond the binary of strong versus weak IP protection typically used in the literature. Original theoretical contributions include the innovation regime typology, a disaggregated treatment of TRIPS flexibilities as institutional resources for domestic pharmaceutical development, and a dynamic model of IPR-innovation relationship evolution. Keywords: intellectual property rights, technology licensing, pharmaceutical industry, innovation, Nigeria