Scientific knowledge production and economic development: an empirical analysis

ANDRÉS LÓPEZ; PABLO JACK; JEREMIAS LACHMAN

Congreso; 16th Globelics International Conference; 2018

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between scientific knowledge production and countries? income level. We argue that scientific performance could be considered as an indication of the educational and technological capabilities within an economy. We use academic publications in refereed journals as a proxy of scientific performance. We also look for the specific effects of engineering publications and of the specialization of a country in engineering. We distinguish those impacts in high versus middle income countries and, among the latter, between Asian and Latin America ones. The results show that academic publications are consistently and positively correlated with income per capita, for both middle and high income countries. In the latter group we find nonlinear effects, suggesting the presence of decreasing returns of academic performance. Finally, we find that Asian countries have benefited more from academic production in engineering than their Latin American peers