What nurtures fourth industrial revolution? An investigation of economic and social determinants of technological innovation in advanced economies

Lu Wang, Gong-li Luo, Arif Sari and Xue-Feng Shao

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2020, vol. 161, issue C

Abstract: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by technological transformations, artificial intelligence, and the digital revolution. The technological innovation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to be a supply-side miracle, with long term gains in the efficiency, as well as production. The widespread variability in the innovation performance of countries has led to the development of many underlining theoretical explanations. These explanations primarily revolve around the role of international trade, research and development, foreign direct investment, human capital, and the financial development in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Previous studies, however, have only looked at the micro-level determinants of technological innovation. Also, previous studies have tended to ignore the cross-sectional dependency among countries, and the heterogeneity in analysing the issues that pertain to technological innovation. This study examines the macroeconomic indicators of technological innovation in G-7 countries from the year 1996 to 2017. The results show that globalization, R&D, GDP, financial development, and human capital are important factors in explaining technological innovation. Furthermore, the results of the panel causality test suggest that there is bidirectional causality from economic globalization, financial development, human capital index, research and development expenditure, and real GDP to technological innovation, and vice versa. The findings from this study may be helpful when designing policies that are related to globalization, financial development, and innovation.

Keywords: Economic globalization; Financial development; Human Capital; R&D; Technological innovation; G-7 countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162520311318
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:161:y:2020:i:c:s0040162520311318

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2020.120305

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().