No abstract

Research and Development (R&D) is the common denominator of innovation and technological progress, supporting sustainable development and economic growth. In light of the availability of new datasets and innovative indicators, in this work, we introduce a novel perspective to analyse the international trade of goods through the lenses of the nexus R&D-industrial activities of countries. We propose two new indices, RDE and RDI, summarizing the R&D content of countries’ export and import baskets—respectively—and investigate their evolution in time, during the period 1995–2017, and space. We demonstrate the potential of these indices to shed new light on the evolution of R&D choices and trade, innovation, and development. In fact, compared to standard measures of countries’ development and economic growth (e.g., the Human Development Index among the others tested), these indices provide complementary information. In particular, tracing the trajectories of countries along the RDE-HDI plane, different dynamics appear for countries with increased HDI, which we speculate can be reasoned with countries’ availability of natural resources. Eventually, we identify two insightful applications of the indices to investigate further countries’ environmental performances as related to their role in international trade.

<p>Innovation and technological progress are the main drivers of sustainable development and economic growth, and they both play a role in addressing climate change and related actions. These drivers rely on Research and Development (R&D), i.e., the systematic creative work aiming to increase the stock of knowledge and devoted to the creation and development of new products and procedures. Against the existing literature that differently addresses the economic implications of the R&D sector, in this work, we introduce a novel quantification of the R&D content embedded in countries’ export baskets. Considering the current need to understand the dynamics of CO<sub>2</sub> emissions and their nexus with the economic aspects, the R&D content in nations’ export baskets is related to the country-specific terrestrial carbon emissions. To this aim, we refer the CO<sub>2</sub> emissions embedded in nations' export baskets to the dollars the country at hand exports, defining a country-specific CO<sub>2</sub> export intensity; in this way, we can compare economies of different sizes (for example, Germany and Paraguay). Our results show that as countries export products with an increasing R&D content, their CO<sub>2</sub> export intensity decreases. Germany, Japan, and the United States are examples of countries exporting high R&D products and having low CO<sub>2</sub> export intensity. China stands as an example of elevated CO<sub>2</sub> intensity despite having a high R&D content embedded in its export basket. Fuel exporting economies (such as the Russian Federation) and the majority of developing countries have low R&D-oriented export baskets, with high CO<sub>2</sub> export intensities. Our work provides a novel perspective of the R&D-CO<sub>2</sub> emissions nexus, highlighting the R&D centrality in the green transition and decarbonization process.</p>