National intellectual capital: A comparative longitudinal study

Abstract

Since its inception, the intellectual capital (IC) framework, which developed from accounting and financial perspectives, focused primarily on firm-level analysis. There have been several important attempts in the literature to take IC to the macroeconomic level. The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between national intellectual capital, proxied with modified National Intellectual Capital Index (NICI) introduced by Bontis [7], and the Human Development Index (HDI), which became an important alternative to the traditional single dimensional measure of a country's development, like the gross domestic product [42]. The paper proposes a modified NICI suggested by Užienė [52]. The analysis includes panel data regression analysis for 12 countries. The dataset incorporated longitudinal data for weighted components of the NICI index for the period of 21 years (2000-2021). The results revealed that each of the elements of NICI, namely National Human Capital (NHC), National Market Capital (NMC), National Process Capital (NPC), and National Renewal Capital (NRC), exhibits significant impact on the levels of HDI in the said period. However, all elements, apart from NRC, show significant positive impact on HDI, pointing to the conclusion that these factors represent an important foundation for achieving and maintaining national competitiveness. Contrariwise, NRC was revealed to have the significant negative impact on HDI, opening the door to the question whether NRC is a real driver of national development, or just the effect of already reached development level.