Innovation output estimation method for a national innovation system: application to the BRICS countries

Abstract

The evaluation of the ability of a country to promote innovation is a valuable step to assist countries in designing suitable economic policies. A usual approach to perform such evaluation and for ranking countries according to their innovation rate is the usage of innovation indices. However, those indices are not appropriate for evaluating whether a set of countries are producing innovation below of what is expected from them. Thus, the aim of this study was to create a model using structural equation model (SEM) to allow evaluating the innovation capacity of any country and to calculate the expected outputs as a function of the estimated inputs. The model showed that the countries belonging to the BRICS group, except for South Africa, presented outputs close to or above the expected for these countries, achieving a performance similar to the group of countries with negative scores of input and output factors.