Macroeconomic Report & Economic Updates

Nigeria Economic Update (Issue 31)

The 2019 Global Innovation Index (GII) depicts that out of 129 economies surveyed; Nigeria ranked 114 in terms of innovation performance1. While this position is four places up from Nigeria’s 118th position in 2018 (due to commendable performance in medical innovation), Nigeria still features as one of the lower-middle income countries whose overall innovation performance falls below expectation for the level of development. This is far below countries like Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique, Malawi, and Madagascar who stand out for being innovation achievers. Nigeria’s weak performance may have portrayed a shifted focus to innovation quantity than to quality. This reflected in the GII measure of innovation quality as Nigeria ranked low in Research and Development, knowledge impact and diffusion, creative outputs, ICT and general infrastructure. The implication of not being an innovation-driven economy is that businesses become uncompetitive thus affecting exports and increasing vulnerability to business cycle fluctuations. As such, increasing the R&D expenditure as a share of GDP from the current 0.22%, by both private and public sectors, is an important step towards enhancing innovation.

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