Jiandong Ju,Xuebing Yang
Author information
a Center for International Economic Research, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China Department of Economics, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019, USA
b Division of Business and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University at Altoona, Altoona, PA 16601, USA
E-mail: jujd@sem.tsinghua.edu.cn(Jiandong Ju), xyang@psu.edu(Xuebing Yang)
Using data from 24 OECD countries, we find that the relationship between a country’s R&D investment and technological advantage in a sector (measured by the country’s labor productivity of the sector relative to the rest of the world) is non-monotonic. In particular, for countries whose technology levels are much lower or higher than the rest of the world in a sector, their sectoral R&D investment declines as their advantages in the sector improve; for counties with middle technology levels, the opposite is true. Extending the Eaton and Kortum framework, we develop a static model to theoretically analyze the relationship between R&D investment and technological advantages. We show that when the research efficiency in a sector is sufficiently elastic with respect to the sectoral technological advantage, a country’s R&D investment increases with its technological advantage, and vice versa.
R&D patterns , trade , technological advantage
Jiandong Ju, Xuebing Yang. The Cosine-Shaped Pattern of Innovations and Technological Advantages: Theory and Evidence. Front. Econ. China, 2013, 8(4): 476‒489 https://doi.org/10.3868/s060-002-013-0024-8