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Regulatory Regimes And The Ease Of Doing Business In Nigeria

CONCLUSIONS

Regulators have a pivotal role to play in improving Nigeria’s business climate and scaling up the country’s growth trajectory through stimulated economic competitiveness. This vital role can be effectively played without necessarily compromising standards, if the right balance is struck between growth and ethics. In other climes where regulators have successfully acted as catalysts for growth, a seamless, non-overlapping and non-conflicting legal framework has always been a striking feature.

In the advanced OECD economies, workable and streamlined corporate governance structures, that are preventive rather than just punitive, have helped regulators achieve high level of regulatory compliance by economic actors – business entities – without causing much pain (Nigerian regulators such as the Nigerian Stock Exchange, Securities and Exchange Commission, Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria, Standard Organisation of Nigeria, CBN, Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation, National Pension Commission, National Insurance Commission, Nigerian Communications Commission, NAFDAC, Department of Petroleum Resources, etc. should take a cue from this). This is why these countries continue to maintain high positions yearly on both the World Bank’s Doing Business Report and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index.

When asked how Ghana, a comparatively smaller economy but with a better rating than Nigeria on the 2015 Ease of Doing Business Index (“EODBI”), has been able to get things done efficiently and by so doing, drive its economic competitiveness significantly upward, Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, Ghana’s Minister for Trade and Industry repeatedly emphasized that the government has constantly provided support and created a mutually benefiting regime in which the trio of regulators, investors and the State jointly take ownership of the enterprise system and become partners in progress. Undoubtedly, Nigeria would also do well to adopt such an inclusive and collaborative model.

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