The Drivers of National Innovative Capacity: Implications for Spain and Latin America

In the past decade, both academic scholars and policymakers have focused increasing attention on the central role that technological innovation plays in economic growth. There are at least two distinct reasons for this increased interest. First, though economists have long recognized the centrality of technological innovation in microeconomic and macroeconomic processes (Schumpeter, 1950; Solow, 1956; Abramovitz, 1956), leading models and frameworks for understanding economic growth and national competitiveness did not directly incorporate the economic drivers of the innovation process until the late 1980s and early 1990s (Romer, 1990; Porter, 1990; Nelson, 1993). At the same time, the dramatic political changes wrought by the end of the Cold War and the globalization of economic activity have increased the salience of productivity growth as a principal goal of policymakers across the OECD. In turning their attention to the sources and consequences of technological innovation, the academic and policy communities confront a striking empirical puzzle: while R&D activity is relatively dispersed around the world, "new-to-the-world" innovation tends to be concentrated in a few countries at a given point in time. For example, during the 1970s and the early 1980s, only Switzerland, a relatively small but very technology-intensive country, achieved a per capita "international" patenting rate comparable to the rate achieved by U.S. inventors.