Geography of Science: Competitiveness and Inequality

Abstract

Using ideas and tools of complexity science we design a holistic measure of \textit{Scientific Fitness}, encompassing the scientific knowledge, capabilities and competitiveness of a research system. We characterize the temporal dynamics of Scientific Fitness and R\&D expenditures at the geographical scale of nations, highlighting patterns of similar research systems, and showing how developing nations (China in particular) are quickly catching up the developed ones. Down-scaling the aggregation level of the analysis, we find that even developed nations show a considerable level of inequality in the Scientific Fitness of their internal regions. Further, we assess comparatively how the competitiveness of each geographic region is distributed over the spectrum of research sectors. Overall, the Scientific Fitness represents the first high quality estimation of the scientific strength of nations and regions, opening new policy-making applications for better allocating resources, filling inequality gaps and ultimately promoting innovation.

References in corpus (6)

• The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity
• Universality of citation distributions: towards an objective measure of scientific impact
• Nestedness in complex networks: Observation, emergence, and implications
• The Scientific Competitiveness of Nations
• Interacting discovery processes on complex networks
• Universal Database for Economic Complexity

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Equivalence between the Fitness-Complexity and the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithms
• The Evolution of Competitiveness across Economic, Innovation and Knowledge production activities