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 (\({\mathrm{RCA}}\)) index. In this paper, we propose the concept of revealed comparative advantages weighted (\({\mathrm{RCA}}_{w}\)) 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 \({\mathrm{RCA}}_{w}\) matrix called Citation Space. We found that the proximity of two technologies and the technological diversity of a country varies significantly if we use \({\mathrm{RCA}}\) or \({{\mathrm{RCA}}}_{w}\). We hope that these findings contribute to enriching the discussion about citation matters at the time of describing capabilities of a territory.
Article highlights
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We observe that the more developed countries receive on average more citations for their patents than non-developed countries.
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Complex countries tend to lose a smaller rate of technologies if we measure their capabilities using the technological diversity weighted.
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Revealed comparative advantage weighted (\({\mathrm{RCA}}_{w}\)) is a good indicator to reflect the capabilities of a territory–since in the case of technology, it is a measure that considers number of patents and citations.
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Mora-Apablaza, L., Navarrete, C. Patents as indicators of the technological position of countries on a global level?. Scientometrics 127, 1233–1246 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04268-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04268-y