The international economics of resources and resource ... - Index of

252 R. Walz
In addition to exports, which are the basis of the RXA, the RCA takes also the
imports m into account and is calculated according to:
" , , ! #
X X
RCAij ¼ 100» tanh ln xij mij
All specialization indicators are normalized between +100 and–100 (see Grupp,
1998). Positive values indicate an above average specialization on the analyzed
technologies, a negative value shows that the country is more specializing on other
technologies.
Sustainability technologies are neither a patent class nor a classification in the
HS-2002 classification of the trade data from the UN-COMTRAD databank which
can be easily detected. Thus, for each technology, it was necessary to identify the
key technological concepts and segments. They were transformed into specific
search concepts for the patent data and the trade data. This required an enormous
amount of work and substantial engineering skills. Furthermore, there is a dual use
problem of the identified segments. The data only indicates that there is a
technological capability which could be used for sustainability—not necessarily
that these technologies are already implemented in a way that the environmental
burden is reduced. Thus, in order to reflect that ambiguity, the term sustainability
technology, which is used in the remainder of the text, has to be interpreted as
sustainability relevant technology.
3 General framework conditions for innovations
The quantitative data on innovation capacity give a first indication of the general
conditions for innovation. Figure 2 indicates that the national R&D intensity or the
share of the business expenditures on R&D of industry (BERD) is rather different for
the NICs covered. It reaches from very small numbers, e.g. for Indonesia ID) or the
Philippines (PH), to values typical for OECD countries, e.g. for Singapore (SG),
Taiwan (TW), or South Korea (KR). Thus, there is considerable heterogeneity
among the NICs. Among the NICs, particular interest is often put towards the so
called BICS countries, that is Brazil (BR), India (IN), China (CN) and South Africa
(ZA). The number for the BICS countries is around average for the analyzed NICs.
However, China has increased the R&D expenditures lately, and runs ahead within
BICS. Given the size of China, the volume of national R&D expenditure and BERD
or the number of scientists is much higher in China than in the other BICS countries.
Looking at specific numbers with regard to inhabitants, India clearly lacks behind
the other BICS countries.
A second approach for the analysis of the general framework conditions uses the
survey data of the World Economic Forum (WEF 2006), which is based on expert
opinions. In order to obtain an innovation system index, the indicators are classified
into the categories human resources, technological absorption, innovation capacity
and innovation friendliness of regulation. For this index, 56 countries are taken into
account, comprising OECD countries as well as NICs and a few developing
countries for which the indivcator values are available. The indicator values are
j
xij
j
mij