Pdf knowledge economy

Rather, knowledge must be used and applied in appropriate ways for it to become an essential element in the development of a knowledge economy. Investment levels in higher education and the use of ICT in industries are also used by the OECD as supplementary indicators of the development of a knowledge economy in a given country. Given that practically every form of human activity requires knowledge of some type or another, and that use of knowledge-embodying technology has become ubiquitous in almost all working processes in an advanced economy be it a shop assistant using an electronic cash register or a road sweeper using a new cleaning machine , too broad a definition can lead to the conclusion that the knowledge economy is simply a synonym for any type of modern economic activity.

A region which specialises in computer assembly will find that associated demands for highly skilled indigenous labour are small, that opportunities for knowledge-based or technology-based spin-offs are negligible, and that the assembly activity itself may in due course relocate to another region or nation which can satisfy the same modest local skill requirements at a lower wage rate.

Development opportunities may be missed, and local activity levels in these sectors may even decline through unintended policy neglect. More specifically, and briefly anticipating the discussion in Chapter 3, the fundamental characteristic underpinning the specific definitions adopted relates to the level and type of domestic labour skills embodied in production. The OECD has been at the forefront of developing statistical indicators for knowledge-related activity, and has sought to compile internationally comparable data so that the performance and progress of individual countries in the knowledge economy can be measured and evaluated.

The difficulty of identifying genuinely knowledge intensive industries relates to the limitations on data, particularly on service sector industries, since only those sectors on which internationally comparable data can be sourced are included in OECD definitions and measures. There is an immediate difficulty in relating these OECD indicators to activity at a regional level. They are not designed to enable one to focus in on the pattern of activity at a national or sub-national level.

However it does not reveal any information about regional specialisation within that chain. One nation or region may predominate in high skilled research and development, another may simply be using lower skill to assemble or use the outputs of other regions or nations. Even within a single OECD country and within a single industrial sector different regions may have very different profiles of activity.

However the movement of this link of the knowledge chain has no effect at all on the global indicators - since the knowledge chain itself still exists. Moreover since the global indicators are limited to those on which internationally comparable data is available, it is entirely possible that a region may specialise in a form of high skilled activity which is not currently measured at the international level.

Very few indicators for knowledge industries have so far been proposed that could enable closer observation of the activity in sectors other than manufacturing. Equally, while the general level of skill in the Scottish Labour Force has been identified as an important issue, no attempt has yet been made to measure the skill and knowledge content of industries in Scotland. The extant indicators in use are therefore preliminary and require substantial further refinement. There is another problem associated with reliance on OECD indicators alone which is that these are something of a moving target; since they are developed on the back of global data becoming available and quite properly in their context are constantly being changed and refined, industries can move between medium and high technology classifications and service sectors can come in and out.

However if a more fundamental set of indicators for regional use could be developed, premised on domestic knowledge content, rather than on global knowledge content, policy-makers may be less vulnerable to the vagaries of shifting global data availability.

Additional definitions and potentially more stable ways of identifying actual and potential Scottish knowledge-based industries are needed in order to develop a more comprehensive set of knowledge economy indicators for policy use. What is the temperature of water at boiling point? What is the capital city of Argentina?

These types of codified knowledge are most often gained through the process of formal education, since education is itself a method of transmitting such knowledge. One would not expect a person educated only to basic school-leaving qualifications or with a degree in history to know about complex chemical processes.

However one would assume that a chemistry graduate would have such knowledge. Know-how refers to skills, often gained through practical experience. Many types of innovation are dependent on the know-how of individuals to take existing information and ally it to new ideas. For example, software developers are in essence using their knowledge and experience of extant technology to innovate and produce new applications. They are also expanding their knowledge base when applying existing knowledge to the new application in order to determine how the new system performs.

However neither the initial development or the interpretation of the new technology is codified. The developers are using tacit knowledge, which cannot easily be replicated because it has not been stated in explicit form. The extent to which an individual possesses this form of knowledge is difficult to measure.

It is also difficult to track the ways in which tacit knowledge can subsequently be codified and made explicit. Eliasson 8 has observed that while research and innovation rapidly create new tacit knowledge, the educational level of the receiver determines how quickly such knowledge can be transmitted. The educational and technological level of a production system also determines how efficiently a new knowledge base can be turned into industrial applications.

This suggests that while know-how may be different from know-what and know-why, the effectiveness of know-how within a knowledge economy is related to the surrounding levels of know-what and know-why. This implies that all means of obtaining knowledge and all educational processes are important whether formal schooling or on- the job training. This also leads into the role of know-who.

Know-who refers to knowledge networks, where the sharing of knowledge and collaboration among similar groups can lead to a growth in the knowledge base. They work best together and not in isolation. Their existence may explain agglomerations of skill, whereby the outputs of a group of similarly skilled people may be greater than the sum of their individual and separate outputs. However there has been a trend across OECD countries to seek to offer individuals alternative means for recognising and validating their acquired skills and knowledge.

The rationale behind NVQs was to enable a way of measuring the skills base of the workforce: A system was needed that would recognise the skills people already had and that was consistent, reliable and well structured. It would allow the skills-base of the country and success in upskilling the whole of the national workforce to be measured. Qualifications needed to be realistic and accessible with scope for progression9 In essence a National Vocational Qualification Scottish Vocational Qualification or SVQ in a Scottish context is a statement of competence that is intended to facilitate entry into or progression within employment, further education or training.

The statement of competence incorporates specific standards - the ability to perform a range of work-related activities and the possession of levels of skill, knowledge and understanding that underpin performance in employment. New skills frameworks have been developed which also enable other formal educational qualifications to be expressed in terms of NVQ equivalence. This can be seen more clearly through an example. Recently, Microsoft launched its new operating system Microsoft XP.

The launch of the software presents an opportunity for individuals to upgrade their skills. Who is best placed to achieve this upgrading of skills, those reliant solely upon the education system for skill conferment or those employed in a particular occupational group? A certificate of competence in Microsoft XP is only possible once the tacitness accumulated within the individual know-how has been codified and packaged. The time-lag between the new software being codified and packaged ready for students to formalise their learning will, even by conservative estimates, be superseded by the launch of another software development.

Even if it does it will probably arrive at a time when technology has moved on and the merits of obtaining the accreditation have diminished.

Formal education in this context does not provide the most efficient method of skill accumulation. One would rationally expect those directly involved in an occupation that requires everyday interaction with computer software to upgrade their computing skills more easily than someone employed in an activity with limited computer-related occupational requirement.

Therefore the occupational position that an individual holds will impact upon their propensity to accumulate new and enhance existing skills. In relation to the accumulation of ICT-related skills particularly, this might be regarded as being of particular importance in the development of a knowledge economy - since the use of ICT can speed up the process of both transmitting and receiving information.

In order to do this one needs to identify the actual Scottish knowledge content of their goods and services. Building on previous work carried out by the authors, including the development of a Scottish Labour Market Intelligence Model,11 four new measures are proposed.

These measures seek to identify indicators of the levels of know-what, know-why and know-how currently existing in Scottish industry, while one particular measure Measure Three begins to provide some limited evidence on the existence of know-who knowledge activity.

The measures then enable a ranking of industries to be compiled according to the evidence of the Scottish skill content embodied in the goods and services they produce. It is beyond the scope of this paper to develop detailed evidence for indicators of networked knowledge or know-who currently operating within the Scottish economy.

However a more precise method of measuring inter-industry knowledge flows is currently being developed by the authors. Formal levels of education can be subsumed within the NVQ framework since it includes both an analysis of the levels of competence within each NVQ classified level and an indication of where certain formal qualifications may be deemed broadly equivalent. There are 6 NVQ levels of competence, ranging from 0, which indicates no recognised skill, through to Level 5, which indicates a very high level of skill.

Appendix Two gives the full definitions of each level of competence and the equivalence of formal qualifications within the framework. Broadly speaking, NVQ Level 2 indicates a competence and skill equivalent to that achieved through basic school-leaving qualifications; Level 3 and above indicates achievement beyond the level of compulsory schooling, Level 4 is broadly equivalent to first degree level with the highest Level 5 deemed equivalent to achievement of higher degree or beyond.

However, it is important to re-emphasise that an individual recognized as having a certain NVQ level of skills need not have formal education certification attesting to the fact. The authors used the previously developed Scottish Labour Market Intelligence Model to analyse the NVQ levels of the Labour force across 56 industries, which in aggregate cover the entirety of Scottish economic activity.

Classification of 56 Input-Output groups. Top 30 Industries ranked. The average NVQ level covers all of the workforce across all of the occupations employed in that industry. This measure is indicative of the overall skill level within a particular industry, however as an average it covers all occupations employed within the industry. A second measure can be made to identify which industries have a requirement for the very highest levels of skill.

These are the highest levels of skill that can be measured under this system. Industries with a high proportion of employees possessing this degree of skill are relatively specialised in the use of embodied labour knowledge.

Table 4: Industry rankings of proportion of employees with an NVQ level of 4 or 5. Compared with Table 3, there is some variation in sector-specific rankings, with Health, Social Work and Veterinary Services entering the top five at the expense of Auxiliary Financial Services. If one returns to Table 3 and examines the average NVQ level in these industries it can be observed that, while Computer Services is also number 2 in terms of overall industry skill level, Computer Manufacturing does not feature at all in the top 30 industries ranked.

This would seem to suggest that the type of work required within the Scottish Computing Services industry which includes, for example, design and maintenance of computing systems, IT consultancy etc has a significantly greater labour knowledge requirement than that of the Scottish Computer Manufacturing Industry. It is a moot question whether an industry, formally classified as an OECD high technology sector, but which has an overall revealed domestic skilled labour input of less than basic school-leaving qualifications, can be considered part of the existing Scottish knowledge economy for policy purposes.

However, every industry also buys inputs in the form of local goods and services in order to produce its own particular outputs, and Scottish skilled labour in the domestic supplying sectors is embodied in these operating purchases of commodities. The volume of domestic skilled labour indirectly embodied in Scottish products can be empirically estimated, since the SLMI model referred to earlier13 contains a government-produced Input-Output table for Scotland which details domestic inter-industry transactions in goods and services.

A sector with a Skill Added Ratio SAR greater than unity is domestically skill augmenting, in the sense that its own workforce is adding a higher average level of skills to its products than that which is embodied in its purchases of local goods and services needed to produce those products. Clearly, in this context an industry with a SAR value of unity is domestically skill neutral.

It can be seen that the rankings in Table 5 are similar to those in Table 3 though the increase of a manufacturing sector, Medical and Precision Instruments, to a top 5 ranking may be noteworthy.

Closer inspection of the data indicates that this outcome is largely explained by the fact that, while SAR numerator values reflect sector-specific labour technology characteristics and thus are highly variable, the SAR denominator values reflect the embodied skill contents of a wide variety of commodity inputs and hence tend to reflect economy-wide labour technology characteristics, resulting in a range of calculated values scattered fairly narrowly around the all-Scotland base year average NVQ level of 2.

This paper has earlier suggested that occupational position can itself signal a relatively high degree of skill, and also the nature of that skill. In relation to the development of a knowledge economy it is sometimes considered that ICT diffusion across the economy the use of ICT is as important as direct engagement in an ICT industry per se.

It could therefore be suggested that industries which have a significant proportion of employees engaged in occupations which have a high ICT content are more likely to have a body of tacit skill and knowledge in relation to the use of ICT which is not necessarily captured under more traditional measures of skill. A fourth measure is therefore proposed, which is to identify the industries which are likely to have a high degree of ICT knowledge, perhaps tacit as well as explicit.

This is done by observing the proportion of employees in ICT -related occupations across Scottish industry. Top 30 industries charted. Unsurprisingly given the nature of its outputs, Computer Services has a far higher proportion of its workforce in defined ICT occupations than any other sector.

Research Collaborations Scientific research moved in the latter part of the 20th century from individual researchers to teams, producing an upward trend in the number of authors per paper Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi ; Adams, Black, Clemmons, and Stephan Papers with more authors tend to be published in journals with high impact factors and garner relatively more citations than those with fewer authors Wuchty et al. In the s and s, the increase in scientific collaborations was accompanied by an increase in international collaborations — that is in a growing proportion of papers with coauthors from different countries National Science Board ; Adams Table 5 examines the position of Korea and its main scientific collaborators in terms of internationally co-authored papers in and The shares increase sharply for the world and for most countries, including the U.

In 1. They show that the U. Japan is the second largest collaborator for Korea, though its proportion of collaborations also dropped. Germany, the United Kingdom, and India increased their share of Korean collaborations, as did many countries with smaller scientific presence.

One likely reason for this is that it takes time for new researchers and labs to develop the tacit knowledge that often produces better work. Another is that scientists from Korea lack the network connections of scientists from more established research countries that help produce greater rates of acceptance in prestigious journals and produce many citations.

Examining Korean scientific journals included in the Science Citation Index, Park and Leydesdorff find that even though the journals are published in English, Korean authors in international journals hardly quote papers published in them, which minimizes their contribution as part of a Korean network of scientists citing each other. Papers are published no earlier than Since international collaborations link Koreans and scientists from countries with larger and more established scientific systems, such collaborations offer a channel to increase the impact of Korean scientific work.

Koreans writing papers in institutions outside the country would benefit from the tacit knowledge and the connections among persons working for the institutions. Koreans returning to the country with publication experience outside the country should be able to leverage that experience to conduct more impactful research.

Table 6 examines how Korean authors writing their papers in Korea who had overseas experience, defined as having a prior paper with an address overseas and no address in Korea, fared in the impact factor of the journal of publication and in the number of citations to their paper relative to authors in Korea with no such experience.

Since it is necessary to disambiguate the names of individual scientists to determine if they have an earlier English-language paper, I use PubMed data, for which Torvik and Smalheiser have developed a sophisticated algorithm for differentiating individuals with the same name.

The first two columns include covariates for the language of the journal, the country publication year and the detailed field as reported in the Web of Science. The last two columns include three variables that reflect the characteristics of the article, i.

The regressions show that U. This pattern could reflect that work experience in the U. Both U. While the magnitude of the coefficients differ somewhat, they are not statistically significantly different. To see how Korean researchers working outside the country fare in their publications, I examine next the relationship between having a Korean first or second author on a paper with all addresses outside Korea and the impact factor of the journal of publication and the five-year forward citations of papers.

The identification hinges on the fact that last names such as Kim are especially likely to represent Koreans while names like Zhang are likely to be Chinese, and names like Johnson likely to be Anglo- American.

Table 7 records the regression coefficients and standard errors on the Korean ethnicity of first and last authors, with the first two columns including covariates for the language of the journal, the country publication year and a detail field as reported in the Web of Science. The last two columns include the number of authors, the number of addresses, and the number of references to the article. The regressions yield similar findings.

All of the estimates for first authors having Korean names are positive, indicating that these researchers produce papers that have higher quality by the impact factor and citation indicators than first authors with names with other ethnicities.

The estimates for last authors being Korean show negative effects on impact factors and positive but statistically insignificant effects on citations. The lower impact factors for last-author and presumably senior Korean researchers may reflect their being more poorly connected to the network of scientists outside Korea than comparable researchers in those countries or possibly to their being not as skilled as their younger cohorts. Finally, a number of studies show that papers for which Koreans in Korea collaborate with researchers outside the country produce are more impactful than those resulting from collaborations of researchers within the country.

All told, international experiences appear to improve Korean research, with Koreans generally doing well working in overseas locations, with those returning home having better research performance than researchers without overseas experience, and through international collaborations.

Few if any development economists would have believed this to be possible three or four decades ago. Kwon et al.

But it is difficult to gainsay that Korea succeeded through activist governments setting industrial policy and thus to maintain the shibboleth that markets alone suffice to produce modern economic growth. The third lesson is the theme stressed in section 2 of this paper: that Korea made the jump to a modern knowledge-based economy with help from the globalization of higher education and international research collaborations, and in particular from its close ties to the U.

The fourth lesson is that Korea did all this with a democratic government, with citizens regularly electing presidents from competing parties or factions of parties and with open political debate in the parliament and country.

Finally, the Korean case also shows that movement to a knowledge economy does not by itself resolve economic problems. It transforms some problems, eliminates some, but leaves others festering or possibly contributes to them.

Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, knowledge for my economy? Lee for South Korea, Figure 8, with interpolations for missing years. There are 50 country-year observations with article count missing, and 18 observations with zero articles.

Missing values in GDP or population reduce the usable observations for Panel A column 1 down to 1, The data for PCT- Patent is available for every year and every country, but entirely missing for Singapore. There are 72 country-year cells with zero PCT-patent. This makes the observations in column 5 different from that in column 1. Starting from , Korea has positive patent count fast growing.

The triad patent data begin in , reducing the sample in Panel C. Adams, J. Black, J. Clemmons, and P. Gittelman, and B. Patents: An Overview and Analysis. Ang, J. Bartzokas, A. Turner, and P.

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