The global inventor gap 1990-2005: Measuring catch-up and stagnation in inventors between world regions

The geography of global inventive effort reflects a central trend of globalization and countries ability to move towards knowledge economy. In stylized postulation, the number of inventors in a country is indicative about its situation in the global innovation ecosystem and the status of its knowledge economy. Obviously, such a measure enables much speculation about the nature and direction of global development, and especially about the relationship between advanced and developing countries. In an effort to cast light on this development on global scale, this paper explores empirically how the inventor gap between advanced economies, emerging economies, and developing countries is evolving 1990-2005. Instead of relying on existing indicators or measures (e.g. Archibugi and Coco, 2004; Fagerberg et al., 2007), we develop new distance-to-frontier indicator to measure the global inventor gap. Based on fractional count of inventors from different countries, we estimate the inventor intensity (measured as fractional patents per population) for 50 countries and for the rest of major world regions, and then how different countries evolve relative to the defined world frontier between 1990 and 2005. The central objective is to measure what type of countries (or clusters of countries) are able to move towards global frontier in inventor-per-population measure, what countries are able to catch-up significantly, and what countries are falling behind.