Abstract
In this paper, we study the correlation between the transmission power and some indicators used to measure the knowledge-based economy. For the case study, we select six OECD countries (USA, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and South Korea) and six indicators (gross domestic expenditure for research and development (GERD), number of researchers, gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, GDP per capita, Human Development Index (HDI) and total factor productivity (TFP)). The time series of the transmission power over a 10-year period (2001–2010) are built on the basis of publication data collected from the Web of Science. The correlation between transmission power and the selected indicators is computed. Results show that Japan and South Korea exhibit a positive strong correlation between transmission power and GERD on one hand and transmission power and number of researchers on the other hand. These two countries have the same pattern as regarding the transmission power and each of the selected indicators; other countries do not show any comparable pattern. The study concludes that the transmission power computed at national level only is not sufficient to measure the extent to which an economy is knowledge-based, because it does not take into account the synergy contributed at international level by a nation innovation actor.
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Notes
Since the term has been coined, conferences were held (e.g. by the European Union, cf. European Commission - EUROSTAT 2006; or OECD, cf. OECD & National Science Foundation, 1999) to discuss its measurement. Frameworks were set up to provide the concept with indicators (APEC Economic Committee 2000; Chen and Dahlman 2005; OECD 1996) and enable its measurement. Strategies and plans were formulated at international, regional and national levels (e.g. APEC Economic Committee 2000; Australian Bureau of Statistics and Trewin 2002; European Commission 2010a).
The Word Bank established the Knowledge Economy Framework which built two indicators: the Knowledge Economy Index (KEI) and the Knowledge Index (KI) (Chen and Dahlman 2005).
The Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation defined the idealised knowledge-based economy under the name of Nikuda and fixed its characteristics (APEC Economic Committee 2000, pp. 3–16). The statistics are recognized as too idealistic.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (2002) suggested the Global Knowledge-Based Economy Index (GKEI) as a measure.
The areas are networked access, networked learning, networked society, networked economy and networked policy. See http://www.readinessguide.org.
The HDI time series cover only the period 2005–2010. Indeed, the indicator is provided by interval of 5 years from 1980 to 2000 and for each year from 2005 to 2013 in the recent Human Development Report (UNDP 2014). So, for methodological reasons, we restrict data to the period 2005–2010 for the HDI.
The databases searched were Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Science (CPCI-S) and Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH).
Globalization after the end of the Cold War between 1990 and 2000 (cf. Leydesdorff and Sun 2009).
The bilateral entropy values are not presented in this article.
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Mêgnigbêto, E. Correlation Between Transmission Power and Some Indicators Used to Measure the Knowledge-Based Economy: Case of Six OECD Countries. J Knowl Econ 9, 1168–1183 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-016-0408-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-016-0408-2