The interplay between innovation, standards and regulation in a globalising economy

Knut Blind and Florian Münch

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: To examine the different roles of regulation and standards in the age of globalisation, we hypothesize and investigate the relation of regulation and national and international standards on the one hand with innovation input (R&D expenditure) and innovation output (patents) on the other hand. The analysis is based on data of 26 high-income countries between 1998 and 2018. There are two main results. Firstly, international standards outperform both de-regulation and national standardisation as they are positively associated with R&D expenditure and patenting. On the other hand, national standards – once believed a source of competitiveness – are negatively related to patents and hence seem to localize economies and slow-down innovation. Secondly, de-regulation does not correlate positively with R&D expenditure, but with increased patenting. We argue the former suggest businesses did not – as assumed – spend freed up resources on R&D, but instead strategically used patenting to replace lost regulation-based protection with patent fences. This casts doubts on the added social value of de-regulation induced innovation.

Keywords: globalization; innovation; patents; R&D; regulation; standardization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F00 H00 L00 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2024-03-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-reg, nep-sbm and nep-tid
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Published in Journal of Cleaner Production, 15, March, 2024, 445. ISSN: 0959-6526

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