The competitive advantage of nations: An application to academia

Abstract

Within the field of bibliometrics, there is sustained interest in how nations "compete" in terms of academic disciplines, and what determinants explain why countries may have a specific advantage in one discipline over another. However, this literature has not, to date, presented a comprehensive structured model that could be used in the interpretation of a country's research profile and academic output. In this paper, we use frameworks from international business and economics to present such a model. Our study makes four major contributions. First, we include a very wide range of countries and disciplines, explicitly including the Social Sciences, which unfortunately are excluded in most bibliometrics studies. Second, we apply theories of revealed comparative advantage and the competitive advantage of nations to academic disciplines. Third, we cluster our 34 countries into five different groups that have distinct combinations of revealed comparative advantage in five major disciplines. Finally, based on our empirical work and prior literature, we present an academic diamond that details factors likely to explain a country's research profile and competitiveness in certain disciplines.

The influence of R&D intensity of countries on the impact of international collaborative research: evidence from Spain

“…Additionally, an economic approach was also used by these authors, who observed that high-income countries were the core group in international collaboration and that they tend to be the main partner of other types of countries. Interestingly, in our study the highest percentage of papers in collaboration with low R&D countries is found in Agriculture and Chemistry (29 and 33 % respectively), maybe because Spain is a particularly ''attractive'' partner for low R&D countries in these fields in which it shows a high specialisation or revealed comparative advantage (Harzing and Giroud 2014).…”

“…The examination of this set of papers allows us to identify Italy and China as the most beneficial partners (RCR [1 in both cases) and it is interesting to note that both countries show high specialisation in Mathematics, that is, their share of publications in the field is higher than in all science fields (Harzing and Giroud 2014). Furthermore, among the low R&D countries that more often collaborate with Spain, Latin America is prominent as a regional partner (Brazil, Argentina and Mexico) probably for language-sharing reasons, along with a number of Eastern European Countries, such as Poland, Hungary, Romania or Ukraine, which have been described as specialised in Mathematics (Glänzel 2001;Harzing and Giroud 2014). Among low R&D countries the collaboration with Romania and Ukraine shows a particularly high impact, which again points at the positive effect of specialised partners.…”

Identifying the research focus of Library and Information Science institutions in China with institution-specific keywords

“…Pouris and Ho (2014) used AI to identify the emphasized and underemphasized research fields of Africa. Harzing and Giroud (2014) used AI to discover the competitive advantages of nations for different academic disciplines.…”

An adapted Porter Diamond Model for the evaluation of transnational education host countries

“…As such, despite the criticism, the PDM has been used to evaluate competitive advantage in various industries and countries. In higher education (HE), the PDM has been used to investigate several aspects, including research competitiveness (Curran, 2000); Countries' comparative advantages in academic disciplines (Harzing and Giroud, 2014); and the competitiveness of the national HE systems (Stonkiene et al, 2016). Nevertheless, the PDM has not been used in the context of TNE, and from the TNE exporting country/institution's perspective, to evaluate a TNE host country as export destination.…”