Patents as indicators of the technological position of countries on a global level?

Loreto Mora-Apablaza () and Carlos Navarrete
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Loreto Mora-Apablaza: Universidad de Concepción
Carlos Navarrete: Université de Toulouse

Scientometrics, 2022, vol. 127, issue 3, No 3, 1233-1246

Abstract: Abstract The technological capabilities of a country play a key role in identifying paths to economic growth and development. Policymakers have a special interest in understanding the advantages and opportunities that arise in a location, with the purpose to make good public policy recommendations. One widely used measure in the literature of economic complexity is the revealed comparative advantage ( $${\mathrm{RCA}}$$ RCA ) index. In this paper, we propose the concept of revealed comparative advantages weighted ( $${\mathrm{RCA}}_{w}$$ RCA w ) as a measure of technological capability, using metrics of concentration (number of patents) and impact (patents citations) at the same time. Here, we analyze near two million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) associated with 44 countries in the period 2006–2015. We show that the GDP per capita of a country is positively correlated (R2 = 30%) with the number of citations that its patents receive. We also find evidence indicating that more complex countries lose a lower rate of their capabilities. Finally, we built a network to represent the connections of technologies based on this $${\mathrm{RCA}}_{w}$$ RCA w matrix called Citation Space. We found that the proximity of two technologies and the technological diversity of a country varies significantly if we use $${\mathrm{RCA}}$$ RCA or $${{\mathrm{RCA}}}_{w}$$ RCA w . We hope that these findings contribute to enriching the discussion about citation matters at the time of describing capabilities of a territory.

Keywords: Patents; Citations; Economic complexity; ECI; Impact; Technological diversity; 90B15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D85 O10 O33 O39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04268-y

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