Abstract
The findings of the previous Chapters have described the process of specialization in science and technology in advanced countries. Quantitative data on several S&T indicators and databases have been used to examine the trends of the 1970s and 1980s at national and at sectoral level. This Chapter will pull together and summarize the different threads of the analysis and go on to examine the relationship between specialization and national performance. After the analysis in the previous Chapters of the specialization profiles of advanced countries in technology and science and the data provided on the degree of specialization in countries and sectors, the concluding questions to be addressed focus on the different national patterns of technological specialization and on the impact they have on national performance. In particular, two issues will be examined:
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The first question is: how can the similarities and differences in national patterns of technological activity be defined? Are there common patterns across countries emerging from the comparison of national sectoral specialization?
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Notes
Data on patents granted in the US are used here and particular caution is therefore needed in interpreting the results for the US, due to “domestic market effect” pointed out in Chapter 4 (see Table 4.5).
The maximum value of the distance indicator is found in the very special case when two countries concentrate all their activity in two different sectors which have the lowest shares of patents in the world distribution. The lowest these shares, the greater the maximum, which also depends on the number of classes of the distribution. In order to avoid erratic values, the average of the five sectors with the lowest shares of the world distribution has been considered in calculating the maximum. While such a standardization does not affect the relative position of countries in a given period, it is required in order to make comparisons over time, as is done in Tables 10.1 and 10.2. We are indebted to Maurizio Vichi for his advice in developing this index.
They have generally used data on the sole production of innovations rather than the total technological intensity of each sector, which ideally should include bot the innovations produced and those used in the sector.
We are indebted to Maurizio Vichi for the development of this index.
The same analysis has been carried out also for all 16 countries, finding broadly similar patterns of association among the variables, but less stability over the two periods considered.
This lower R square is due to the extremely high growth rate of patents shown by Spain (which is largely an institutional artifact); if Spain is removed from the analysis, the R square value for the equation is 0.58.
The values for the EEC aggregate are shown in the graph, but obviously have not been included in the calculations of either the correlation index, or the regression line.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Archibugi, D., Pianta, M. (1992). The Patterns and Impact of Technological Specialization. In: The Technological Specialization of Advanced Countries. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7999-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7999-5_10
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