Last night I posted the abstract of "Research publications and economic growth: evidence from cross-country regressions," and one of the authors shared the article with me today. I was curious to see the size of the effect of the research-publications variable. The authors write:
The coefficient of 0.82 denotes that if a nation doubles its research outputs, the GDP growth rate will increase by 0.82% points per year on overage. P. 984.
That is a very sizable effect. In fact it is almost twice the effect of secondary education on economic growth in their regressions. It will take a huge amount of resources for a country to double its research output, but if you think about developing countries it might not take a lot because the current amount of research is relatively low, if there is some.
The study includes 34 countries in most of the specifications, and most of them are developed counties. I wonder what would be the effect of research on growth if more developing countries are included in the sample (data allowing).
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