• Innovation investment growth at 15-year low, says UN

The Federal Government has stated that Nigeria must attract at least $100 billion in investments yearly to become a middle-income country by 2050.
Minister of Budget and National Planning, Atiku Bagudu, stated this yesterday at a policy dialogue on ‘Deepening Legislative-Executive Synergy for Effective Economic Governance in Nigeria’ organised by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) in Abuja.
 
Meanwhile, growth in global innovation funding has fallen to its lowest rate since 2010, United Nations (UN) projections showed yesterday, as high inflation eats into research and development spending and as venture capital deals slump.
 
The minister explained that the Agenda 2050 was not an over-ambitious plan, but a realistic pathway to prosperity. He said President Bola Tinubu had demonstrated that the dream was realisable and had taken risks never attempted in developing countries, adding that the results were beginning to show.
 
According to him, Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda is a deliberate attempt to reverse years of weak fiscal capacity and systemic distortions. Without bold choices and stronger synergy between the legislature and the executive, Nigeria risked falling further behind its peers in global economic competitiveness.

Bagudu stated: “We calculated that to achieve this objective, Nigeria requires at least $100 billion investment per annum from both the private and public sectors.
 
“Agenda 2050 is structured into six medium-term plans, beginning with 2021–2025 and moving in five-year phases until 2050. As of June 2023, our revenue-to-GDP ratio stood at nine per cent, one of the lowest in the world, compared to the European Union (EU) average of 31 per cent; that has now risen to 16 per cent due to recent reforms, but we are still punching below our weight.”
 
In its yearly ranking of the world’s most innovative economies, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) placed Switzerland at the top of the list for the 15th consecutive year.
 
Sweden and the United States retained their second and third positions for the third year running, while China edged its way one spot higher and into the top 10.
 
But while the ranking picture largely resembled that of recent years, the UN patent agency cautioned that global innovation funding growth had notably slowed.