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Spatial spillovers and European Union regional innovation activities

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Abstract

This paper explores the role of spatial spillovers in the innovation processes across 245 NUTS 2 European Union (EU) regions for the 2008–2012 period. The patent applications at the European Patent Office were chosen as a proxy for innovative activity. In the first step of the empirical analysis, the spatial pattern examination of the innovative activity based on the selected global and local indicators for spatial association confirmed the presence of a spatial dependence process in the distribution of innovative activity. Next, we attempted to model the behaviour of innovative activity at the EU regional level on the basis of extended regional knowledge production model. Spatial econometric analysis indicated the relevance of internal innovation inputs (R&D expenditure and human resources in science and technology) and we also found out that, the production of knowledge by EU regions seems to be also affected by spatial spillovers due to innovative activity performed in other regions.

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Fig. 1

Source: own calculations

Fig. 2

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Fig. 3

Source: own calculations

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Notes

  1. The year 2012 was the last published year of used statistics at the time of the analysis and the chosen time span was determined mainly by the availability of data.

  2. The empirical part of the paper was carried out in the GeoDa, GeoDa Space and R software packages.

  3. Natural Breaks Maps are constructed on the basis of the Jenks Natural Breaks algorithm (see e.g., De Smith et al. 2009).

  4. The Box Map is an extended version of the Quartile Map, in which observations with extreme values in the first and fourth quartile are displayed separately.

  5. With respect to the goal of the paper this analysis is not presented here.

  6. Statistical inference was based on a random permutation procedure (for details see e.g., Getis 2010).

  7. We do not report the results of other spatial versions of the model (8) due to insufficient space.

  8. Testing the statistical significance of marginal impacts corresponding to different levels of neighbourhood was based on a simulation approach (see LeSage and Pace 2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Operations Research and Econometrics, University of Economics in Bratislava, Dolnozemská cesta 1, 852 35, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Andrea Furková

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  1. Andrea Furková
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Correspondence to Andrea Furková.

Additional information

This work was supported by the Grant Agency of Slovak Republic—VEGA Grant No. 1/0248/17 “Analysis of regional disparities in the EU based on spatial econometric approaches”.

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Furková, A. Spatial spillovers and European Union regional innovation activities. Cent Eur J Oper Res 27, 815–834 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-018-0581-4

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