SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance
No 457:
Innovation and Performance in Manufacturing Industries: A Comparison of the Nordic Countries
Hans Lööf ()
, Almas Heshmati ()
, Rita Asplund ()
and Svein-Olav Nåås ()
Abstract: The availability of new internationally-harmonized
innovation survey data collected from OECD countries has created some
interesting opportunities for studying the following two key areas: (1) the
determinants of innovation behavior at firm level, and (2) innovation as an
important factor contributing to the economic growth. This paper looks at
the relationship between innovation and productivity in Finland, Norway and
Sweden at the firm level. Although these countries enjoy a high degree of
political, social and cultural similarities, they differ largely from one
another in their productivity growth and national innovation systems. The
main objective here has been to examine how an identically-specified
econometric model might work when the survey sampling and questionnaire are
identical but the national data sets are estimated separately. Findings
from the micro-based data in Europe known as Community Innovation Survey
(CIS) data were subsequently investigated to see whether or not they
contributed to explaining the presence of cross-country differences in
aggregated productivity growth. Results reveal major discrepancies between
the estimated firm-level results and the aggregated figures. Differences in
the country regression results were investigated to see whether they were
due to data errors, the econometric model, model specifications, estimation
methods or unobservable country-specific effects. The tentative conclusion
is that the representativeness of the respondent firms, the model
specification and unobservable country-specific effects may partly account
for the deviations between macro and micro levels.
Keywords: Community Innovation Survey; CIS; cross-country comparisons; innovation; manufacturing; firms; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: C51; D24; L60; O31; O32; (follow links to similar papers)
38 pages, August 6, 2001
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Lööf, Hans, Almas Heshmati, Rita Asplund and Svein-Olav Nåås, (2003), 'Innovation and Performance in Manufacturing Industries: A Comparison of the Nordic Countries', ICFAI Journal of Management Research, Vol. 2, May, No. 3, pages 5-35
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