The Model of Innovative Efficiency Factors of a Country

Technological progress is the most important source of long-term productivity growth, and that plays the major role in economic development and growth in material living standards. Several studies have shown a relationship between national IQ of a country and its innovative efficiency (efforts). In this paper, we create a model of innovation efficiency based on the national rate of publication of high-quality scientific studies (estimated by the Nature Index). The correlation of national IQ and the Nature Index is nonlinear, when fitted with a quadratic function the proportion is 40%. This increases to nearly 54% when we adjust for the impact of a socialist legacy in the past or present, and this socialist legacy's interaction with IQ. Some researchers have argued that both IQ and publication activities are determined by welfare. We tested this hypothesis and found that IQ explained a significant percentage of publication activity over and above that explained merely by GDP per capita. It suggests that IQ really is an independent factor that predicts innovation. Meanwhile, introducing GDP per capita into the innovation model increases the explained variance in the publication activity index by just 1.7% points. Finally, we looked at the influence of three Schwartz culture value orientation scores (intellectual autonomy, affective autonomy, and hierarchy) as predictors of innovation rates. Only affective autonomy was found to significantly increase the predictive power of our model. Including it in our model annulled the main effect of a socialist legacy, though not its interaction with IQ. We conclude the paper with a discussion of possible reasons for why a socialist legacy seems to suppress innovation, compare our findings about the role of cultural values with those reported by another researcher, and offer suggestions for further research.

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