Scientific knowledge production and economic catching-up: an empirical analysis

Pablo Jack (), Jeremias Lachman () and Andrés López
Additional contact information
Pablo Jack: CONICET-Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto Interdisciplinario de Economía Política de Buenos Aires (IIEP)
Jeremias Lachman: CONICET-Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto Interdisciplinario de Economía Política de Buenos Aires (IIEP)

Scientometrics, 2021, vol. 126, issue 6, No 2, 4565-4587

Abstract: Abstract This paper aims to investigate the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and level of income for a panel of 56 countries during the period 1996–2015. We argue that the accumulation of scientific knowledge is a key factor for the enhancement of educational and technological capabilities within an economy, and hence may have a positive impact on GDP per capita levels. We use academic publications in refereed journals (in all areas and specifically in engineering) as a proxy of scientific performance. As regards the impacts of scientific performance, we distinguish between high- and middle-income countries and, among the latter, between Asian and Latin America. The results show that academic publications are consistently and positively correlated with income per capita, for both middle and high-income countries. We also find non-linear effects in both groups. Those effects are lower for middle-income countries suggesting the presence of decreasing returns on academic performance. Finally, while Asian countries benefited from specialization in engineering research, no such effects were found for their Latin American peers.

Keywords: Science; Innovation; Growth; Developing countries; O30; O47; C23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-021-03973-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:scient:v:126:y:2021:i:6:d:10.1007_s11192-021-03973-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-021-03973-4

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().