Relationship between the international universities rankings and indexes of a country’s innovation development

Abstract

Currently, the global economy is experiencing a global innovation gap, representing a set of significant disparities in the innovative development of individual countries. The global innovation gap is a consequence of a number of objective phenomena and processes taking place in different countries and regions. The study of the nature of the innovation gap implies the study of specific problems in the innovative development of countries, as well as the search for ways to solve them. This article examines the relationship between the global innovation index and the positions of national universities in international rankings. We have chosen a group of countries (developed, developing and transition economies) and their universities which ranked best in international rankings. The sample consisted of 24 countries, the university’s rating was chosen as the dependent variable, and the country’s rating on the global innovation index was selected as an independent variable. After the calculations, the linear pair correlation coefficient was set equal to 0.913, which indicates a high level of coupling between the variables. The coefficient of determination indicates that in 83.35% of cases the changes in x lead to a change in y. In other words, the accuracy of selecting the regression equation is high. The remaining 16.65% change in Y is due to factors not taken into account in the model (as well as by specification errors). The conducted studies confirmed the connection between the quality of education, the research sector of universities and the level of innovative development of countries. This made it possible to propose a set of measures to strengthen the positions of national universities in international rankings and increase their contribution to the transition of the Russian economy to an innovative development path.