Scientific knowledge production and economic development: an empirical analysis

ANDRÉS LÓPEZ; JEREMIAS LACHMAN; PABLO JACK

Congreso; European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy Annual Conference; 2018

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between scientific knowledge production inuniversities and academic institutions and countries? income level. We argue that scientificperformance could be considered as a manifestation of the improvements of the educational andtechnological capabilities within an economy. We use academic publications in refereed journalsas a proxy of scientific performance. We also look for the specific effects of per capita engineeringpublications and of the academic specialization of a country in engineering. The impacts ofscientific publications on middle income countries are also analysed, as well as their differenteffects in Asian and Latin America countries. The results show that academic publications areconsistently and positively correlated with income per capita, for both middle and high incomecountries. In addition, we find nonlinear effects, suggesting the presence of decreasing returns ofacademic performance. This means that middle income countries could benefit more than for highincome countries from just improving their scientific base. Finally, we find that Asian countrieshave benefited more from academic production in engineering than their Latin American peers.