The Geography of Inventive Activity in OECD Regions

This work is among the first systematic attempts to analyse comparatively the distribution of inventive activity across regions in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) economies with a set of homogenous measures to measure the process of knowledge production and dissemination. The descriptive analysis shows that inventive performance is concentrated in some regions in Continental Europe, North America and Japan. Highly inventive regions tend to cluster together. This spatial dependence is found to have increased over time. The inventive performance of regions is directly influenced by the availability of human capital and research and development expenditure. Local agglomeration factors are also found to have a significant impact, while some negative effects appear when regions are mainly rural or when they are mainly service-oriented.