How Has the Portuguese Innovation Capability Evolved? Estimating a Time Series of the Stock of Technological Knowledge, 1960-2001

The importance of promoting innovation has been elevated up to a status of official standard since the Lisbon European Summit in 2000. Here research and development (R&D) was singled out as an essential element of the foundation on which innovation could be built. R&D has been a growing area of investigation namely at level of firms micro studies aimed at uncovering firms’ innovation capability. At the macro level, the relevance of R&D for countries’ innovation capability has been, in a dynamic perspective, more often presumed rather than effectively tested. This latter limitation is, to a large extent, explained by the paucity of aggregated continuous time series on innovation indicators specifically those based on R&D expenditures. This paper aims at filling this gap by providing an estimate of the Portuguese innovation capability over the two last four decades based on the accumulated R&D efforts. Such indicator, albeit preliminary, will desirably endorse new investigation on the Portuguese catching-up process and, in this way, might inform present and future public programs related to R&D policies in particular and innovation policies in general.