CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between scientific knowledge production in universities and academic institutions and countries? income level. We argue that scientific performance could be considered as a manifestation of the improvements 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 per capita engineering publications and of the academic specialization of a country in engineering. The impacts of scientific publications on middle income countries are also analysed, as well as their different effects in Asian and Latin America countries. The results show that academic publications are consistently and positively correlated with income per capita, for both middle and high income countries. In addition, we find nonlinear effects, suggesting the presence of decreasing returns of academic performance. This means that middle income countries could benefit more than for high income countries from just improving their scientific base. Finally, we find that Asian countries have benefited more from academic production in engineering than their Latin American peers.