Preface: I am just another ignorant westerner. Any one of my impressions of these countries could be so wrong as to make my conclusions meaningless. If I'm wrong, please be gentle.
I believe there's some differences of scale here. China and India both have over a billion people. With 10x the population of Nigeria, even with identically bad property rights and legal systems (and I suspect that both India and China are somewhat better off in that regard than Nigeria), with that difference in addressable market you'd expect more startups out of them.
Russia -- which has a shrinking population now roughly the same as Nigeria's rapidly-expanding one -- is a more interesting comparison. I think the only difference here is that Russia was formerly a wealthy country (as opposed to a country in which a few extremely wealthy people live) which invested heavily in education, while Nigeria is a formerly poor one that has yet to catch up.
So if Nigeria were to suddenly pour as much money into education as the USSR did, you might expect a flood of Nigerian startups in a decade's time. But that would explain why there aren't too many of them right now.
I think some of the other commenters addressed this well, but as for Russia, it's a terrible example and has a lot of the same problems that Nigeria appears to; Newsweek just ran an article on the subject: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/14/putin-s-russia-exile-busi... .
As for China and India, both countries have GDPs that have been growing at 10% per year for more than two decades, and not purely from oil or other natural resource profits, which appears true of what growth Russia and Nigeria have experienced.
That's not to say India and China will continue their incredible growth forever, or that either country is ideal for startups, but my impression (once again: might be wrong) is that despite the problems startups face, those problems are not as tremendous as they are in Nigeria or Russia.
In addition, as far as I know neither India nor China has produced any global Internet software product companies along the lines of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, or Facebook.
"I think some of the other commenters addressed this well, but as for Russia, it's a terrible example and has a lot of the same problems that Nigeria appears to; Newsweek just ran an article on the subject: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/14/putin-s-russia-exile-busi...
You can continue to read placed PR Newsweek articles and be an idiot (the part about the "has a lot of the same problems that Nigeria appears to" is sort of the point of using it as an example), or you can do a quick google search:
I personally fear for them too. HK is probably not an issue but for some of the other places, I find them risky.
That being said, if you can't find money in the US/Canada for your idea, do whatever you need to succeed. If I lived in those countries, I wouldn't give a crap and just try. At least I'd have an idea of what to watch for better than us looking at those countries from afar.
