MODELING NATIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL CAPACITY WITH PATENT INDICATORS

Scientific, technological, and economic data are investigated for 128 countries. A stepwise regression analysis is carried out on the data, using domestic patent counts as the dependent variable. The form of the regression equations is the Cobb-Douglas production function. The analysis shows that domestic patents (as indicator of national technological capacity, and treated here as the dependent variable) are closely related to GNP (a measure of national economic size), counts of scientific publications (an indicator of scientific capacity), and counts of national patents obtained in the U.S. (a measure of world class technological capacity). Together, these three independent variables account for more than 92 percent of the variance in the dependent variable.