More on the patent issue — China, India and Japan
We noted in a recent piece that certain societies have disproportionately low representation in the ranks or entrepreneurship, invention and innovation, and suggested one part of an explanation for this. Here are some additional data from Science Magazine which are consistent with our analysis, and include China, India, and Japan, among others.
It appears from the numbers that Communism and Islam have possibly been at least partially responsible for stifling the inventiveness of almost a third of humanity. We note as well the remarkable progress of China since it decided to adopt a capitalist economy. China has only had a patent law for 20 years, and is now near the top of the list, a remarkable testament to the amazing working of freedom and incentives.
February 27th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
The methodology is clearly flawed. Are Canada & the UK only 1/20th as innovative as the US? Is Finland only 1/50th? Remember the Finns were the guys who basically invented the cellphone.
Patent practices vary too widely for this kind of survey to mean anything. Asian countries tend to have a very narrow patents, so more are filed. Many multinational firms file their patents in the US, because of its large market.
February 28th, 2006 at 8:20 am
Roger,
While I think your points make sense, I do not believe that the relative ordering of countries by innovation is significantly wrong. The tax burdens are higher in Canada, UK and Finland as seen in the graph attached to this article:
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/1167/Taxes_ease.html
That means less capital investment, and would imply less patentable innovations. The exact magnitude of the difference in innovation may be exaggerated by differences in the relative ease of patent approval amongst the compared countries. However, it is next to impossible to imagine that economies with heavy tax burdens would be able to maintain a comparable level of innovation with those with lighter tax burdens, simply because capital investment in the former, which funds much R & D, will be substantially lower.
September 13th, 2006 at 6:18 am
The statistics seem to be NOT adjusted by per capita. They are absolute numbers and that’s the reason china tops the list. If you adjust results by the capita the list would look something like:
1. Usa, 2. Japan, 3. Germany 4. Finland
September 13th, 2006 at 6:28 am
Finland and Switzerland seem to top per-capita and per-gdp adjusted patent numbers:
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/60/24/8208325.pdf#search=%22patents%20per%20gdp%202005%20%22