Economic Recognition of Innovation

Globalization has benefited the economies of member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) by helping their businesses stay profitable through cost-effective outsourcing of mostly garden-variety tasks and some knowledge-based activities. With time, the latter will account for the lion’s share of work outsourced and emerging export houses will also tend to cater more to their own domestic markets because of their expanding infrastructure and growing manpower possessing advanced skills. This will result in a leveled playing field coaxing developed countries to adopt widespread innovations to maintain their high perch in the economic pecking order. Such large-scale creativity can be managed better if it could be gauged with an appropriate measure. This work propounds a new economic measure called the Gross Domestic Innovation (GDI) to quantify innovations in OECD countries. It will supplement universal measures such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), productivity and numbers concerning employment. Apart from the methodology for its estimation, the impact of GDI on the various facets of a vibrant economy is discussed and inter alia, the role of GDI in fighting inflation and alleviating the negative influences of globalization is stressed. Also, a tentative analysis on the economies of U.S., Japan, Germany and China is presented to illustrate the concept.