UNESCO SCIENCE REPORT

UNESCO SCIENCE REPORT
Figure 12.3: GERD/GDP ratio for the Black Sea countries, 2001–2013
1.2
1.0
1.02
Turkey 0.95
0.8
0.71
Ukraine 0.77
Belarus 0.69
0.6
0.54
0.4
0.2
0.34
0.28
0.24
Georgia 0.18
Moldova 0.36
Armenia 0.24
Azerbaijan 0.21
0.0
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, March 2015
High-tech exports 7 provide a more approximate measure;
they place Belarus and Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Turkey,
at levels similar to those of some major middle-income
countries but their performance is by no means comparable
to that of countries pursuing global competitiveness through
technology-intensive production, such as Israel or the
Republic of Korea (Table 12.3). This said, the fact that
some countries are expanding production and trade in
medium-tech products can also attest to STI activity, as we
shall see in some of the country profiles that follow.
Patents provide an even more roundabout indicator of
innovation. Moreover, most Black Sea countries do not have
patent indicators using the ‘nowcasting’ method, which
provides reasonably accurate and timely estimates for OECD
countries. With this caveat in mind, we can observe the
following (Table 12.4):
n Per unit of GDP, the number of patents filed by residents
at the national patent offices of Black Sea countries was
7. including a growing number of commodities such as computers and other ICT
goods
among the highest in the world in 2012, according to the
Global Innovation Index (2014).
n Patent Cooperation Treaty applications, indicating
an extra effort to protect intellectual property
internationally, have been growing moderately in
Armenia, Moldova and Ukraine and very strongly in
Turkey. Applications to the two largest developed
country offices (European Patent Office and the US
Patent and Trademark Office) have grown quite strongly
for Turkish residents and, to a lesser extent, for Armenian
and Ukrainian ones.
n None of the Black Sea countries seem to invest
significant resources in Triadic patents, indicating that
they are not yet at a stage of development where they
can compete with the advanced economies for S&Tdriven
industrial competitiveness.
n The Black Sea countries appear to invest heavily in
acquiring trademarks, which give a measure of creative
effort but are less directly correlated with S&T as such,
according to the Global Innovation Index (2014).
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