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Produce patents or journal articles? A cross-country comparison of R&D productivity change

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Abstract

This paper compares R&D productivity change across countries considering the fact that national R&D expenditure may produce multiple outputs, including patents and journal articles. Based on the concept of directional distance function and Luenberger productivity index, this paper develops a Luenberger R&D productivity change (LRC) index and then decomposes it into R&D efficiency change (catch-up effect) and R&D technical change (innovation effect). Utilizing a panel dataset of 29 countries over the 1998–2005 period to implement the empirical estimation, the results show that the R&D productivity growth is mainly attributed to the innovation effect; meanwhile, non-OECD countries have better performance on both efficiency change and technical change than their OECD counterparts. Moreover, patent-oriented R&D productivity growth serves as the main source of national R&D productivity growth than the journal article-oriented one.

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Notes

  1. See Acemoglu et al. (2006) for a comprehensive survey of both theoretical and empirical literature on the innovation-economic growth nexus.

  2. Färe et al. (1994) take the Malmquist index of TFP growth and describe how decompose its index into various components.

  3. As the scale of a country is hard to adjust in the short-run, most previous studies assumed an innovation production with constant returns to scale between inputs and outputs (e.g., Griffith et al. 2006; Hashimoto and Haneda 2008; Lee and Park 2005; Parisi et al. 2006).

  4. Total R&D expenditure is performed by both public and private sectors and covers the expenditure of basic research, applied research, and experimental development such as land, buildings, instruments and equipment, and other current cost on creative work undertaken systematically to increase the stock of knowledge.

  5. Following the assumptions widely adopted in previous studies (e.g., Hall and Mairesse 1995; Mairesse and Hall 1996), we assume a depreciation rate of 15 % for R&D expenditure stock. Moreover, as suggested in Guellec and van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie (2004), the growth rate is set to being an individual country’s average annual rate of R&D growth.

  6. For the pitfalls and advantages associated with equating patent counts with innovation, please see Furman et al. (2002) for a survey.

  7. The 29 countries include Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Spain, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, Japan, South Korea, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

  8. One point worth noting is that the patent quality is not well considered in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    Chiang-Ping Chen

  2. National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, ROC

    Jin-Li Hu

  3. Department of Economics, National Central University, 300, Jhongda Road, Jhongli 320, Taiwan, ROC

    Chih-Hai Yang

Authors
  1. Chiang-Ping Chen
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  2. Jin-Li Hu
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  3. Chih-Hai Yang
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Correspondence to Chih-Hai Yang.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7, 8, 9, and 10

Table 7 Annual Luenberger R&D productivity change by country (%)
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Table 8 Mean scores and ranking of LRC, PLRC, and JLRC in each country
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Table 9 Annual Luenberger R&D efficiency change by country (%)
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Table 10 Annual Luenberger R&D technical change by country (%)
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Chen, CP., Hu, JL. & Yang, CH. Produce patents or journal articles? A cross-country comparison of R&D productivity change. Scientometrics 94, 833–849 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0811-9

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