National innovation systems, economic complexity, and economic growth: country panel analysis using the US patent data

Keun Lee () and Jongho Lee ()
Additional contact information
Jongho Lee: Yonsei University

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2020, vol. 30, issue 4, No 2, 897-928

Abstract: Abstract This study examines the impacts of national innovation systems (NIS) and economic complexity index (ECI) on economic growth. A composite index of NIS is developed by using US patent data as a weighted sum of three, four or five variables among the following: concentration of assignees, localization, originality, diversification, and cycle time of technologies. Growth regressions confirm the significant and robust impacts of NIS3a, NIS4a, and NIS5 indices on economic growth. The common feature of these NIS indices is that they have the same component variables as their ingredients, and these are originality, cycle time, and technological diversification. NIS3a is the most parsimonious and powerful among all indices. The robustness of ECI is questionable because ECI loses significance after adding government expenditure and terms of trade variables into the regression model. Results confirm the overall importance of NIS in economic growth and justify policy efforts to improve NIS. This research is one of the first to generate a robust NIS index by using patent data only without many data requirements and free from the problem of cross-country comparability of underlying variables.

Keywords: National innovation systems; Economic complexity; Economic growth; Patents; Index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B52 C43 C81 O31 O34 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00191-019-00612-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Chapter: National innovation systems, economic complexity, and economic growth: country panel analysis using the US patent data (2019)
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:spr:joevec:v:30:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s00191-019-00612-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/191/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00191-019-00612-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Evolutionary Economics is currently edited by Uwe Cantner, Elias Dinopoulos, Horst Hanusch and Luigi Orsenigo

More articles in Journal of Evolutionary Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().