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Patenting activity and elements of market structure in the Dutch manufacturing industry

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Summary

On the basis of econometric analysis this survey shows how patent intensity (number of patents in relation to sales) is positively influenced by technological opportunity and expected profit, and negatively by industry size and concentration. In addition, it is investigated whether patents can be used as a proxy for both inventive and innovative activity. To this question no definite answer could be given. A contradictory relationship was found between the R&D/sales ratio and the patents/sales ratio, which in this case merely shows how research based on firm data and industry data can come up with very different results. A general implication is that for studies on the Dutch manufacturing industry the aggregation from firm level to industry level should be treated with caution.

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Authors
  1. Frank J. M. Van Den Berg
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Additional information

The author works for Corporate Development & Economics Department of Unilever N.V. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily coincide with those of my employer.

This article is based on the dissertation that I wrote for the MA in Economics programme at the University of East Anglia (UK). I would like to thank Dr S. Davies, Dr B. Lyons, and G. Hockley Morley for their useful comments, Vanda Morgan for her help with the language and Eline Rossen for her help in finalising this paper. Any errors are mine.

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Van Den Berg, F.J.M. Patenting activity and elements of market structure in the Dutch manufacturing industry. De Economist 137, 476–492 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01705977

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