Abstract
The objective of this study is to examine the impact of international research and development (R&D) spillovers on innovation efficiency of specific R&D outcomes, employing the country-level panel data for 44 countries in the 1996–2013 period. Fully considering the heterogeneity of different R&D outputs, scientific papers, PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents, US patents, and domestic patents are observed separately, which enriches the angles of measuring international R&D spillovers. By applying a stochastic frontier analysis to knowledge production function, we find that foreign R&D capital stock positively contributes to the innovation efficiency of scientific papers, but suppresses the productivity of domestic patents, whereas it does not really matter for PCT or US patents. These results are robust to control for a set of institutional factors and also in sensitivity analyses. Hence, dependence on international R&D spillovers seems neither to be the right way for emerging economies to catch up, nor to be a sustainable model for developing countries to fill the technical gap. Local R&D capital stock, instead, keeps an essential contributor to all four R&D outputs, so raising internal R&D expenditure is actually the key to improving innovation level and sustainable development ability.
Highlights
Having gotten rid of the yoke of neoclassical theory which viewed technology development as an exogenous process, the development of endogenous growth theory by Romer, Grossman and Aghion [1,2,3] underlies the burgeoning literature attaching great importance to knowledge, innovation, and research and development (R&D)
Intermediate R&D outputs comprise primarily patents and scientific papers, and patents can be further classified into domestic patents, PCT patents, and US patents in the statistical scheme
PCT patents and US patents are more related to those multinational corporations which are supposed to play an important role in international knowledge transfer and R&D spillovers
Summary
Having gotten rid of the yoke of neoclassical theory which viewed technology development as an exogenous process, the development of endogenous growth theory by Romer, Grossman and Aghion [1,2,3] underlies the burgeoning literature attaching great importance to knowledge, innovation, and research and development (R&D). When R&D causes differences in the productivity of countries and regions [7], it is improving the global technological level and production efficiency via knowledge transfer or spillovers. Knowledge spillover effects are perceived differently by lots of experts in this field so we can find no one fixed definition [8]. The OECD defines spillover as unintentional transmission of knowledge, while knowledge transfer is identified as intentional knowledge exchange. It is often difficult to recognize intention in the real world, in particular for country-level spillovers. We tend to define spillovers as all forms of bilateral knowledge flow in this country-level analysis
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