Economic Freedom and its Impact on Entrepreneurship Development for Nigerian Economic Prosperity

Abstract

Economic freedom is the condition in which individuals can act with autonomy while in the pursuit of their economic livelihood and greater prosperity. Therefore, the highest forms of economic freedom should provide an absolute right of property ownership, full freedom of movement for labor, capital, and goods and an absolute absence of coercion or constraint of economic liberty by government or any other institution of whatever form. This study was conducted to investigate economic freedom and its impact on entrepreneurship development for Nigerian economic prosperity. Thus, Nigeria is blessed with human resources as it has the highest population with largest labor force in Africa, and is operating free market economy. Therefore, despite all these advantages, Nigeria’s economic freedom is at stake for the fact that the empirical findings of this study revealed that corruption is the major problem of economic freedom in Nigeria for the fact that rule of law is at stake because of corruption in judicial system, government spending is bias toward recurrent expenditure that was breeded from inefficiency/corruption of government officials. Business freedom is at stake because a report indicates that 80% of the Nigerian firms have to pay bribes to government officials. Trade freedom is at stake because the study found out that illegal and indiscriminate waivers, concession and exemption were granted to few firms and individuals which also killed the economic freedom in Nigeria. Eventually the researcher came-up with conclusion and some implications on how government of Nigeria has to overcome those obstacles of economic freedom overtime to achieve entrepreneurship development for economic prosperity.