International Competitiveness in the Field of Innovation

The paper examines the approaches to assessing the competitiveness of a country. It is shown that the competitiveness rankings produced by the World Economic Forum do not correlate with the ones in innovation and R&D. It is concluded that international R&D comparisons based on the GERD/GDP or BERD/GDP alone are not telling enough. These ratios could only be considered as performance indicators in case of equal levels of distribution of R&D expenses. Financial background to sciences and R&D is generally considered as a key factor to competitiveness, but, as the author has demonstrated, the structure of R&D spending also has an important role