Young-chool Choi (p), Hak-Sil Kim, Ji-Hyun Jang

Anne Plunket

Since Korea became a member of OECD DAC member countries in 2010, Korean government has been increasing the size of ODA over time to a significant degree to which it has reached 0.16% of GNI (Gross National Income) and three thousand billion Korean won (Korean currency), which is equivalent to approximately 3 billion US dollars as of 2018. It is expected that this tendency of increase in ODA size also continues to go on worldwide as OECD DAC has highly recommended each DAC member country to increase its ODA size to 0.7 % of GNI, respectively. Against this background, based on the assumption that ODA projects should be effectively formulated, implemented, monitored and evaluated from the beginning to end, this paper attempts to discover the combinations of the configurations associated with the effective management of ODA projects in OECD DAC member countries, with special reference to policy-related variables, and to put forward policy implications for Korea to be able to ameliorate the existing ODA policy governance. The research methodology employed in this analysis is QCA (Qualitative Comparative Analysis). One of the main findings in this analysis is that ODA projects can be effectively implemented in a situation where high level of efficiency in government spending, a high level of transparency in policy-making system, and low-level of public funds diversion are ensured.

Annekatrin Niebuhr, Cornelius Peters (p), Alex Schmidke

Young-chool Choi

We investigate the impact of agglomeration on firm innovation, differentiating between the effects of urbanization and localization economies on four distinct types of innovation in manufacturing and services. The regression analysis covers the period 1999 to 2010 and is based on the IAB Establishment Panel, a representative survey of about 1% of all firms in Germany. Among others, the firms report whether they introduced a new product/service, improved or imitated an existing one. Furthermore, information on process innovation is available. The panel structure of the data set enables us to address an important econometric issue. We control for composition effects caused by the selection of highly innovative firms into dense urban regions by considering both observable and unobservable firm characteristics. The results indicate that composition effects are important. A large portion of the regional differences in firm innovation rates is caused by firm characteristics. Estimates that ignore unobserved heterogeneity at the firm level still point to a positive and significant impact of localization on different types of innovation. However, once we include firm fixed effects and distinguish between manufacturing and services, we, in contrast, only find some weak indication that there is a positive effect of localization economies on radical innovations of manufacturing firms. In addition, the rate to adopt an existing product or service by a manufacturing firm is positively related to the regional employment density. For the service sector, in contrast, we find adverse effects of localization on different kinds of innovation and no important effect of urbanization.

Suelene Mascarini (p), Renato Garcia, Ariana Costa, Veneziano Araujo, Emerson Gomes

Jan Cornelius Peters

This paper investigates the impact of related and unrelated variety on innovations protected by utility model and patent in Brazil. Additionally, we analyse the role of regional absorptive capacity in this relationship. We find that Brazilian regions benefit from both types of variety, but in different ways for each types of innovation. The positive effect of related variety on innovation protected by patent is shaped by levels of absorptive capacity. Such effects cannot be found for innovation protected by utility model. Besides, we finds that innovation protected by patent benefit more than utility from unrelated variety and this relation is not shaped of region’s absorptive capacity

Anne Plunket (p), Felipe Starosta De Valdemar (p)

Suelene Mascarini

Are some regions more likely to produce truly novel technological inventions? Following the recombinant approach which considers novelty as new combinations of existing technologies, this paper investigates the geography of novelty. The literature on regional diversity/variety has shown that the entry of new technologies are on average related to the regional knowledge portfolio, this paper proposes to provide evidence on the link between diversity/variety and the entry of new combinations. These novel inventions at the regional level may combine technologies that are related to their local technology portfolio, that is, regions innovate by combining familiar pieces of knowledge. However, novel inventions may also combine technologies that are more distant and locally unrelated with their knowledge base, and the issue is than to understand what are the conditions that enable regions to produce more novel and breakthrough inventions. We use OECD REGPAT EPO patent data to provide evidence on how French regions produce novel technological inventions over the period 1990-2014. We identify, for each patent and each region, the new subclass pairs that are combined and enter the region for the first time. Based on these French data, we first investigate the extent to which regions innovate using rather close/distant pieces of knowledge and whether they are related or unrelated to the local knowledge base. Second, we study the conditions explaining the regions’ ability to produce novel technological inventions by combining unfamiliar and unrelated knowledge.