EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ABOUT DIFFERENCES IN HUMAN RESOURCE CONDITIONS BETWEEN INNOVATION- AND IMITATION-BASED ECONOMIES

The income and technological inequalities between countries can be derived from differences in country-specific conditions of technological progress. Innovation requires appropriate human resources and institutional environment, as well as firms to innovate. Differences in human, financial and institutional conditions create technology disparities which lead to innovation- and imitation-based economies with different economic performance. Technological changes in the economy are made possible by the creation and application of new knowledge. Therefore, technological progress can be interpreted as a specific form of knowledge accumulation, in which the human resources of the countries play a key role. This research aims to illustrate the inequalities of innovation’s human resource conditions between innovation- and imitation-based economies based on non-parametric and multivariate statistical methods. Variables from the human capital and research pillar of the Global Innovation Index will be compared using different analytical techniques to highlight where the bigger gaps in human resource conditions between country groups are. The main result of this research is that school life expectancy is the factor in which the countries are the most differentiated, so increasing participation in education is important for imitator countries to catch-up with innovation leaders.