An R&D perspective on international trade and sustainable development

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.

Efficiency of BRICS countries in sustainable development: a comparative data envelopment analysis

“…Following Santana et al (2014) and Bekun et al (2019), the unemployed population was used as a proxy for human capital. Research and development (R&D) expenditure was used to assess the effect of technological innovation on sustainable development (Bayarçelik and Tas el, 2012;Costantini et al, 2023). The variable foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are included in our analysis acknowledging its significant role in innovation and sustainable development in developing countries, as evidenced in studies by Lee et al (2021), Chai et al (2021), Sarkodie and Strezov (2019) and Sunde (2016).…”