Scientific knowledge production and economic catching-up: an empirical analysis

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and level of income for a panel of 56 countries during the period 1996–2015. We argue that the accumulation of scientific knowledge is a key factor for the enhancement of educational and technological capabilities within an economy, and hence may have a positive impact on GDP per capita levels. We use academic publications in refereed journals (in all areas and specifically in engineering) as a proxy of scientific performance. As regards the impacts of scientific performance, we distinguish between high- and middle-income countries and, among the latter, between Asian and Latin America. The results show that academic publications are consistently and positively correlated with income per capita, for both middle and high-income countries. We also find non-linear effects in both groups. Those effects are lower for middle-income countries suggesting the presence of decreasing returns on academic performance. Finally, while Asian countries benefited from specialization in engineering research, no such effects were found for their Latin American peers.