International patenting and national technological specialization

This paper is concerned with the comparison of national technological systems for six major industrialized countries. Our analysis is based on an original data bank on international patenting activity that allows one to avoid some distortions that usually affect patent statistics. As a result we offer some methodological guidelines in the use of international patenting as a national technological indicator. Further, the domestic and foreign technological profiles far the six countries are described in detail. We observe that foreign patenting may prove a misleading indicator because internal and external patenting are still two distinct phenomena. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd